The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Clean Unclean

  • Parakeets and Purity

    Parakeets and Purity

    Because the land, the country, is such a focus of horticulture, there are important moments when its extraordinary fetishisation has connected it with movements of the extreme right: rhetorically, to simplify, the land becomes the fatherland.   George McKay, Radical Gardening         I live in north-west London. Sitting in the living room…

  • Surface Tension

    Surface Tension

    Surface Tension is a project investigating life, pollution and biodiversity on the River Lea using photography and sound. Focusing on the blurrings of the natural and unnatural, clean and unclean, built and self-willed in a Lea Valley landscape that is constantly being rewritten and remade, the photographs here were taken on 120 film, and the…

  • Scabies

    Scabies

      We holidayed through its incubation. Time spent with family, the large, extended swell of us, in a rented house by a winter sea. What we shared that Christmas would burrow into our warm and secret places, causing us to begin a new year baffled by scratching. The yo-yo trips to doctors, all those different…

  • The Home Hairdresser, Wakefield

    The Home Hairdresser, Wakefield

    Holding her hair over the sink, the water runs red; it trickles down her temple. It gets on lunch’s dirty plates. The towels are black, the floor beige. Don’t touch your head, you’ll get pink fingers! Put these gloves on, and just comb it out whilst I finish off Emma’s fringe. It splashes. Hair fragments…

  • Editorial: Clean Unclean

    Editorial: Clean Unclean

    My side of the desk is scrupulously clean. The other half is a mess of dust and papers, temporarily abandoned books, a pair of tights, a lump of local granite. The line that separates the two is not as clear as I’d like. From the other side, my wife’s stately, slender Mac spaceship turns its…

  • 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….