The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: art

  • Performance for the Anti-hero

    Performance for the Anti-hero

    New York-based artist Patrick Jacobs unfolds a carefully crafted stage that invite us to seek wonderment in both natural and unnatural landscapes that might easily be overlooked. Painstakingly constructed models display different species of fungi or weeds in the foreground. Each leaf and blade of grass is shaped to situate a humble scene. Jacobs imbues…

  • Shadow Sisters

    Shadow Sisters

    A pack of dogs, a suggestion of a transformation, a woman in a wild place. A wolf. In the analogue photography of Joanna Pallaris, the time, as Hamlet had it, is out of joint. Double exposures make visible the formation of a rock face through the head of a dog. A woman’s face – the…

  • Coyote Journal

    Coyote Journal

    I was raised by a nanny for most of my life. She was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala that made it to Los Angeles, and then into my family home. She was kind and loving, and knew how to get me to be quiet when it was time for me to sleep. She would say…

  • Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children

    Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children

    Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein’s monster. The Capitoline Wolf. Mary Shelley. Four names, four figures forming a strange kind of family, if we can call it that. Perhaps better to say, ‘a pack’. Each is linked to other in a lineage of imagination, creation, or birth. There is a shared marginality. Each was believed somehow to have…

  • almost like almost

    almost like almost

      almost like almost . . . . . . . he said in land there is a line around a wolf within is other and awe social grace packed who wills foul and unrest . . . . . . . when the chaste self ills the line extends skin to no where inside…

  • Significant Others

    Significant Others

      If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. – Ludwig Wittgenstein     I am animal and so are you, but where do we start and end, and could we, ever, converse as equals amongst other animals? It is as much a question about Us as about Them. As early as the…

  • Foxing

    Foxing

    Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of snow, and making a springing high-dive pounce to catch it, such that my tail waves vertically, joyfully, ludicrously, in the air above me.    …

  • Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns

    Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns

    Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth category: unknown knowns – the things we don’t realise we know; the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine our perceptions and actions. Unknown Knowns continues…

  • Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Look into the eyes of the wolf. What does it see? On 29th August 2016, shortly after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth. It shows a large billboard standing in a field of grazing sheep. Upon it is a wolf…

  • The World Without Us

    The World Without Us

    Deborah Westmancoat is a British contemporary painter based in Somerset, UK. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand landscape and our place within it, particularly how the traditionally held metaphysical stages of alchemy: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubredo (redness) might…

  • In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks

    In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks

        28th February 2013         1st March 2014 I slid across the leather seats as the car swung around the obstacles on the track; pulled forwards and pushed back as the steep slopes were tackled. The headlights carved tunnels of green from the forest, the keys rattled against themselves and the…