The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Root Mapping

  • Drawing Water

    Drawing Water

    Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on…

  • Earth Turned Honey

    Earth Turned Honey

      Moksha The desert has no memory. Sun beats on its chest, collarbone glistens: I wait for rain, an angry sea filling the sky to break, blow, burn, make a new world order. Agave pierces clouds while amethyst mountains rest in heavy sleep. I have asked permission to make this desolate ground my home. Beneath…

  • 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…

  • Endlings: Drawing Extinction

    Endlings: Drawing Extinction

    There are many different approaches to drawing animals. In particular there was a shift in the 19th century away from French idealism towards an approach, led by British artists such as Edward Lear, that prioritised drawing direct from nature. The work of Amy Dover, a fine artist and illustrator based in Newcastle, England, draws upon…

  • 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.