The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: Root Mapping

  • Undertow

    Undertow

    Walking the Edge A trusted mentor once told me, having read my work, “You often write about the meeting places of land and water.” She was right, though I’d never thought about the habit before; my tendency to do so was neither intentional nor premeditated. “There are few things more ancient than humans walking to…

  • Hommes sous Hommes, II

    Hommes sous Hommes, II

    In 2005, I went to Palestine for three weeks with my parents, my wife and our daughter, aged two. We were invited to carry out workshops with young artists and kids. A mural was painted on the wall of a playground in a camp next to Qalendia check point. We made several friends and knew…

  • A Foraged Map

    A Foraged Map

    Spread over my kitchen table, emptied from the various cloth bags and tubs, were the wild plants that I’d gathered that day. As I viewed them from above, deliberating as to what kind of meal I could make that would include them all, the array of textures conspired to suggest a visual record of the…

  • Mapping the In-Betweens

    Mapping the In-Betweens

    By the time I was seven I had moved house four times in three countries on two continents. A few years later, I found myself dropped into another new place: a summer spent in Čelákovice, a small town in the Czech Republic. Culture shock, the hollowness of first-time jetlag, feeling so fragile and porous that…

  • A Place That Mattered

    A Place That Mattered

    The place where my son died had horses. Only because when a dying boy asks you for a horse, you find more than one. You make your way away from the busyness of your town beside the wide river to land in the mountains that is not your own. There you watch the horses wander…

  • Mapping Edge

    Mapping Edge

      Mapping Edge   Finger touched mapped faded edge, unending ink black shaped lines, tracing hillsides I walked as a child. Black tufted strokes, old rough pastures, where curlews once rose away from me, ungrazed now, fallen into rush thistled bog. . The parish track, a dry stone wall field margin, a ridgeway in words,…

  • Hommes sous Hommes, I

    Hommes sous Hommes, I

    In 2005, I went to Palestine for three weeks with my parents, my wife and our daughter, aged two. We were invited to carry out workshops with young artists and kids. A mural was painted on the wall of a playground in a camp next to Qalendia check point. We made several friends and knew…

  • From A Queer Ornithology

    From A Queer Ornithology

    For those who delight more in the seed of things, I can say that these poems investigate queer, genderfluid indigeneity, and interspecies-relational philosophy through deep observation of wild birds.

  • Border Dreams

    Border Dreams

    I never dream about maps. I used to draw them for a living. I have dreams about every other passion. It occurs to me that to dream about maps might be almost impossible – like dreaming about dreaming. Mapping is its own activity, its own universe, separate from the rest of the living. One is…

  • Museum: Ursus americanus

    Museum: Ursus americanus

    On birches, bears, and the birth of farm animals: three new poems by Todd Davis.

  • Notes from the Field

    Notes from the Field

    An amateur entomological and botanical study in four locations, at five different times of day, by artist Anna Garrett.