The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: death

  • Dead Owls and Blue Bottle Flies

    Dead Owls and Blue Bottle Flies

    Heather Swan, author of Where Honeybees Thrive, explores the taxidermy art of Claire Morgan alongside her own encounters with owls and death.

  • Absence of Evidence

    Absence of Evidence

    A new photographic collaboration between art duo Henry/Bragg and former street sex workers in Hull honouring 14 of their fellow workers who have died.

  • Canopic Jars: the Afterlife of Matter

    Canopic Jars: the Afterlife of Matter

    Artists Anna Walker and Genie Poretzky-Lee make use of glass jars as containers for an experimental process of growth and transformation.

  • All The Places

    All The Places

    Three poems by South African poet and clinical psychologist Musawenkosi Khanyile, from his recent collection, All The Places, published by uHlanga Press.

  • Animals Out of Place

    Animals Out of Place

    There’s a post on Instagram; a photo mottled with gallery reflections, close-up and a little oblique. It shows a vintage glass slide of a zookeeper and his charge. It’s not the best image but has an instant power. The keeper, wearing a peaked cap and a stern expression, holds high a short, straight chain. On…

  • Gardens Speak

    Gardens Speak

    The Political Performance of Mourning Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation based on the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in gardens across Syria during the first two years of the uprising. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories,…

  • The Look Away

    The Look Away

      Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away     A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…

  • The Old Weird Albion

    The Old Weird Albion

    Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…

  • Blood Ties

    Blood Ties

    There was a girl who met up with a wolf, back in Distant Time, when wolves were human. The wolf wanted her for his wife, even though he had two wives already. When he took her home, his two wives smelled her and knew she was human. After a while she had a child –…

  • Borders

    Borders

      On the Eve we eat menudo. Onion mimics moon from a small bowl, glinted fractals of itself. Cilantro’s diced flesh lingers in the air. Bolilllos wait, steam rising. We all wait. I have inherited this––my life on this schism of wild land, purple montañas littered by desert primrose, a muddy river and barbed wire…

  • Rooting

    Rooting

      . . . . . . . . . .Chihuahua Desert   Blood slid to soil and our roots splintered wide like needle-edged leaves of agave. We can never escape this desert root, dry to core and apt for bitter survival, snide thirst. A cacti can be barren then, overnight, sprout flame petals, but…