The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: installation

  • Space Shifters

    Space Shifters

    The smell of engine oil lingers sharply in my nostrils, hours after I have left the vertiginous room of Richard Wilson’s 20:50, the final coup de théâtre in the Hayward Gallery’s Space Shifters exhibition. My mind keeps returning to the glassy, treacherous surface of the oil, which fills the room to half-way up the wall…

  • 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,…

  • Natural Selection

    Natural Selection

    Freud would have loved this exhibition. Ostensibly Natural Selection – a collaboration between artist Andy Holden and his father, ornithologist Peter Holden – is about birds, nests and eggs. It’s actually about art, sex and death. As a philosophy undergraduate I was lucky enough be taught by the phenomenologist Dermot Moran. Phenomenology, he explained in…

  • The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

    The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

    Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in psychology, Jungian ideas and the power of mythology. Victoria Rance’s latest exhibition, The Night Horse and The Holy Baboon, at The Cello Factory Waterloo, was…

  • 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…

  • Archipelagos of Rest

    Archipelagos of Rest

    The God of Genesis had no use for islands; land rose from sea all at once, assured with purpose. Like cognition, the divine continent is quantifiably useful, brokering communal exchange and the consolidation of cultural routines, yet still – unapologetically – islands persist. These archipelagos, connected to and detached from the whole, seem emblematic of…

  • Points of Departure – Estuary 2016

    Points of Departure – Estuary 2016

    I love the fact that on the coast you can just travel along the edge until the next place. Knowing the way stops becoming an issue even though it isn’t always clear exactly where you are. Everything is continuous. The day that the summer finally breaks into thousands of tiny points of grey drizzle I…

  • Revisiting Unknown Places

    Revisiting Unknown Places

    The art of Maria Pääkkönen concerns itself with a reciprocal relationship between drawing and place. On the one hand is the drawing of the place – that which is observed, recorded, remembered, evoked. On the other is the place of the drawing – its physical presence within the confines of the gallery. Somewhere in between…

  • HOUSEWORK

    HOUSEWORK

    In November 2015, eleven artists took on a Victorian ruin. I was one of them. The resulting exhibition, HOUSEWORK, set out to re-inhabit the stripped-out terrace. In it, paintbrushes and brooms became interchangeable as artworks spilled out into architecture or architecture seeped into art. Words were regarded and discarded; sound waves scribbled in haste; phrases…

  • I, The Thing in the Margins

    I, The Thing in the Margins

    It’s the sound that provides the first clue of something amiss. The loud, low growl of audio feedback fills a room already awash with bright green glare. Sitting upright in a shabby armchair is an inscrutable figure. Both feet rest evenly on the ground. Both arms rest evenly on the chair. Its head is turned…

  • The Barometer of My Heart

    The Barometer of My Heart

    On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I mean, the phallos, is it proper to man?” This question opened the eighth session of a series of lectures given by Derrida between 2001 and…