The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: art

  • Editorial: Fields

    Editorial: Fields

    In May 1982, American artist Agnes Denes began to transform a two acre empty plot at the foot of the World Trade Center into her work Wheatfield – A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill. In the prior months, truck loads of dirty landfill had been dumped on the site, consisting of rubble, dirt, rusty pipes, automobile…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • A space, an ambiance, a home

    A space, an ambiance, a home

    A modest row of cottages is set apart from Cambridge’s Castle Street by a small green on one side and St Peter’s Church on the other, right next to Cambridge University’s ancient Magdalene College and the backs of St John’s. You’d be forgiven for barely noticing the terrace that makes up Kettle’s Yard. Entering the…

  • Sur toute la ligne

    Sur toute la ligne

      As walking, talking and gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go. – Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (2007)                 All images: Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel, Untitled, alcohol-based ink on laminated paper, 65 x 50 cm. Photographs: Romain Darnaud kamilbouzoubaagrivel.com instagram.com/kamilbouzoubaagrivel     This is part of…

  • Living Symphonies

    Living Symphonies

    Between Liverpool Street and Chingford, the heatwave had cooked the train carriage and all who rode in her to fetid ripeness. On the other side of the parting doors, the air thickened with an elegant stink. Gutsy lilies dressed in flouncy ribbon-tied bouquets languished in buckets of water just beyond the ticket barriers, insistent that…

  • The Burroughs Garret

    The Burroughs Garret

    In The Nature of Gothic, nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin wrote that there is beauty in imperfection, and that ‘the demand for perfection is always a sign of the misunderstanding of the ends of art.’ He also says that we should celebrate visible evidence of workmanship – chips and flaws – as ‘signs of the…

  • The Wandering Walk

    The Wandering Walk

    The Wandering Walk is a site-specific installation located on the South Fyn Danish Island of Ærø. It engages with the familiar practice of walking as a mode of perception to explore and enrich the complex and shifting relationships between humans and nature. The installation is focused around the celebrated northern region of Vitsø. Frequently walked…

  • Editorial: Rhythm

    Editorial: Rhythm

    From the impact of clocks on notions of time, to the effects of computers, trains and planes on experiences of modern life, rhythm – in various forms and ways – determines, and has always determined, how we live our lives and how we see the world. Some rhythms bring people together: listening to music can…

  • 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…

  • 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.