The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: nature

  • Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School

    Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School

    Fungi are unusual. They are easier to define through a process of elimination, by identifying what they are not. They are not animal, mineral or vegetable, but ‘fruiting bodies’, strange forms of life growing out of decay, with their own fecund vocabulary: hymenium, volva, universal veil, inner veil, sporangium, spore, apocethium. Since beginning my artist…

  • Epicormic Psychology

    Epicormic Psychology

    The regeneration of Australia’s flora and fauna after fire is swift; or is this just a misconception of a nation’s psyche?     The winding trail of sandstone rubble ascends before me through a pocket of dorsal-fin shaped bushland in Lapstone, in Australia’s Blue Mountains. This ecosystem is not granted a name. Even though it…

  • The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex

    The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex

    Harwich has a split personality. At the northeasternmost point of Essex, the old town is still laid out as the medieval port it once was, but it’s separated from the cranes at Harwich International Port situated a mile up the Stour river. For centuries it was a key access point to Europe: a “gateway”, when…

  • Frankenstein: Before the Beginning

    Frankenstein: Before the Beginning

      Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.     It was precisely two hundred years ago tonight that a very particular nightmare first appeared. In the early hours of 16 June 1816 – around 2:30am if a recent headline-grabbing astronomical…

  • Workers Hammer

    Workers Hammer

    The following is an edited extract from the conversation between artist John Stark and anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt, the first 5000 years and The Utopia of Rules. The conversation was originally published in the catalogue that accompanies DoL Po, Stark’s solo show at Charlie Smith London, 20th May – 26th June 2016.  …

  • The Chernobyl Herbarium

    The Chernobyl Herbarium

    Chernobyl and Plant Life: Silent Witnessing It is incredibly difficult to talk and write about Chernobyl. No serious book on the subject has been able to dodge the task of thinking about the conditions of possibility for thinking in proximity to this theme or this scene. Still before commencing, a work on Chernobyl must first…

  • An Orgy of Toads

    An Orgy of Toads

    Soon after the clocks have gone forward and April Fools has passed, a spring event occurs which has yet to capture the popular imagination in quite the same way as eggs and rabbits. From the sodden depths of secret muddy highways, frogs and toads descend on their annual breeding grounds. For one unnerving week I…

  • Isomorphology

    Isomorphology

    For interdisciplinary artist Gemma Anderson, drawing is a mode of knowing and seeing. While drawing is often understood in terms of isolated observation, by sharing the process with a community, for Anderson, it becomes a type of agency for collective knowledge and critical vision. Drawing therefore functions as a bridge between public and private, between…

  • Kaiku

    Kaiku

    Kaiku peeked through the kitchen window. The scene was empty – the Shaman was out. Kaiku went to the kitchen cupboard. Behind the pots and pans her fingers found a key. With great care she opened the door. The action made her shiver with excitement. The heavy door opened slowly. The room bathed in sunlight….

  • Revisiting Unknown Places

    Revisiting Unknown Places

    The art of Maria Pääkkönen concerns itself with a reciprocal relationship between drawing and place. On the one hand is the drawing of the place – that which is observed, recorded, remembered, evoked. On the other is the place of the drawing – its physical presence within the confines of the gallery. Somewhere in between…

  • Euclid’s First Definition

    Euclid’s First Definition

        Cover image: Euclid, Stoicheia (Elements). Manuscript, Constantinople, September 888. MS. D’Orville 301, fols. 113v-114r © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (via Alain R. Truong)