The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Author: The Learned Pig

  • All Tomorrow’s Publishers

    All Tomorrow’s Publishers

    Saturday-Sunday 17th & 18th October 2015, Noon – 5pm The Peckham Pelican FREE! This October, The Learned Pig is delighted to be co-curating All Tomorrow’s Publishers, a weekend fair for independent publishers, as part of the week-long Literary Kitchen Festival. Taking place at the Peckham Pelican in south London, the fair features a host of…

  • Medieval Graffiti – Charms and Curses

    Medieval Graffiti – Charms and Curses

    This month sees the publication of Matthew Champion’s Medieval Graffiti. The book is a fascinating tour through the centuries of hand-carved writing and art that adorns the walls of churches across the country. One of the key themes that emerges is an apparent lack of clear delineation between official and unofficial – in thought, word,…

  • From the Foreshore

    From the Foreshore

    This March sees an exhibition of large-scale drawings by Sophie Charalambous hosted by curator and gallerist Jessica Carlisle. The works on show capture the strange energy of the Thames foreshore – a place of washed out tones and washed up objects. Timeless characters pick through the sedimentary layers of history; silver and black flows past…

  • Chasing Suns

    Chasing Suns

    The arc of the sun across the sky is one of the most enduring images: repeated every day for all to see. And yet, each time it’s a little different, varying according to geographical location, visibility, and time of year. Chasing Suns is an ongoing long-term photographic project by artist Pauline Woolley. The images were…

  • Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….

  • Here From Now

    Here From Now

    The history of landscape is at the same time a history of art. The eighteenth-century emergence of the picturesque was, as the name suggests, as much a response to painting as it was a response to nature. Land art blossomed as we realised the extent to which we had reformed the surface of the earth:…

  • (Re)Imagining the Insect

    (Re)Imagining the Insect

    54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another!   Jacques Derrida, Typewriter Ribbon, 1998   It is all very…

  • A Field Guide to East London Wildlife

    A Field Guide to East London Wildlife

    Humans are not the only species undergoing a process of urbanisation. It is well documented that we have made a mess of this planet, and – depending on who you speak to – it may be too late to do anything about it. But as the world gradually turns to concrete, and species extinction continues…

  • Modern Naturalism

    Modern Naturalism

    In 1958, the great Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser published the Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture. In it he declared, with characteristic chutzpah, that: “Only the engineers and scientists who are capable of living in mould and producing mould creatively will be the masters of tomorrow.” As far as we’re aware, few have taken up…

  • Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits

    Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits

    Taking place this October – just in time for Hallowe’en – is a two-week festival of esoteric art, entitled I:MAGE 2014, that promises to explore the fertile relationship between artists and spirit entities. If the world of the esoteric can often seem closed off (almost by definition) then I:MAGE 2014 goes some way towards breaking…

  • Journals and Imprints Fair

    Journals and Imprints Fair

      Sunday 22nd June, Noon – 4pm The Peckham Pelican FREE!   This June, The Learned Pig is delighted to be co-hosting a Sunday afternoon journals and imprints fair, as part of the week-long Literary Kitchen Festival. Taking place at the Peckham Pelican in south London, the fair features a host of our favourite independent…