The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Art

  • Reimagining the British Witch

    Reimagining the British Witch

    My first encounter with the works of Hayley Potter was in 2008, and the Secret Creature project: a diverse melange of strange, semi-believable owl-sheep-cat-bat-birds that flocked together in the branches of a community tree and peered out at you myopically. Since then her work has developed and her subjects proliferated. She has worked for a…

  • Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)

    Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)

    In Finland, the wolf is both more and less than an animal; it is a symbol. And this November sees a court case in which the very nature of that symbolism will be on trial. Fifteen men have been accused of the 2013 killing of three wolves (three of a population of around 150) in…

  • A Needle Walks into a Haystack

    A Needle Walks into a Haystack

    Sound carries. And it is the sounds of political and social unrest that offer one of the most interesting threads for navigating this year’s Liverpool Biennial – a constellation of exhibitions, events and curatorial side-shows grouped under the title, A Needle Walks into a Haystack. The Biennial’s greatest achievement is its power to make you…

  • What Was Once the Threshing Barn

    What Was Once the Threshing Barn

    Public/private, urban/rural, commercial/not-for-profit: it’s not like the waters between the two have ever been crystal clear, but now, with the opening in Somerset of the latest outpost of contemporary art giants Hauser & Wirth (London, Zurich, New York) the silt has been stirred up and it all seems just that little bit muddier than before….

  • The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…

  • The Sensorial Invisibility of Plants

    The Sensorial Invisibility of Plants

    Laura Cinti’s work stretches the boundaries of our understanding of plant behaviour. Cinti is best known as an artist who works with biology, and, in addition to her own practice, she is also co-founder (with Howard Boland) and co-director of C-LAB, an internationally recognised interdisciplinary art platform that generates and participates in both artistic and…

  • The Story of a Single Rock

    The Story of a Single Rock

    Like many stories, this one begins with a rock, in fact one rock amongst many: the shifting shingle which geographically defines and continually redefines the salt marshes of Orford Ness. When contemporary artist Anya Gallaccio made her first trip to the shingle spit of the Ness, it was not the accidental sculptures of wire and…

  • Touching Wood

    Touching Wood

    Rarely do curators at large public museums co-ordinate concurrent exhibitions to complement each other. But by chance or design, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is bucking the trend. Of the half-dozen or so solo exhibitions currently on show, there are three which share a common material interest: wood. They form, if…

  • Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    On my way back from the gallery I took a train and experienced the usual flicker of annoyance when the conductor began speaking to us as if we were in a plane. He gave the estimated arrival time, pointed us to the safety notices, alerted us to any suspicious looking bags. It was the usual…

  • Arkhipelagos

    Arkhipelagos

    There is a sense of relief, upon leaving this exhibition, of being palpably bound up with pavement, sky and, a few short paces away, the murky heave and rush of the Thames with its welcome damp rising. A skeleton hull of a boat, displayed on the banks of the Thames, ghosts the space from which…

  • Leap Towards Yourself

    Leap Towards Yourself

    This February sees the publication a new book that spans the entire career of Israeli photographer Sharon Ya’ari. Coinciding with a major exhibition of his work at the Tel Aviv Museum, Leap Towards Yourself demonstrates Ya’ari’s interest in the apparently mundane and frequently overlooked. Frozen in the photograph, however, these scenes become the subject of…