The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: landscape

  • 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…

  • Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

    Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

      Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf   Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…

  • Crossing Over

    Crossing Over

    Late November in Malaga is beautiful and easy: sun, cloudless skies and highs in the upper twenties. The olive trees bask in the late late heat, the Mickey-Mouse-head-shaped cactuses bloom with geranium-pink blossoms and the tourists still soak up rays outside cafés like solar batteries. But drive two hours inland to Granada and the temperature…

  • Zone de sécurité temporaire

    Zone de sécurité temporaire

    There is a strange but commonly used French phrase with no precise parallel in English: entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf. It refers to twilight, when the light has dimmed and one can no longer differentiate between a wolf and a dog (as if it were once so simple to tell the…

  • 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…

  • The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex

    The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex

    Harwich has a split personality. At the northeasternmost point of Essex, the old town is still laid out as the medieval port it once was, but it’s separated from the cranes at Harwich International Port situated a mile up the Stour river. For centuries it was a key access point to Europe: a “gateway”, when…

  • Workers Hammer

    Workers Hammer

    The following is an edited extract from the conversation between artist John Stark and anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt, the first 5000 years and The Utopia of Rules. The conversation was originally published in the catalogue that accompanies DoL Po, Stark’s solo show at Charlie Smith London, 20th May – 26th June 2016.  …

  • Reliquiae

    Reliquiae

    If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…

  • On a Headland of Lava Beside You

    On a Headland of Lava Beside You

    Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…

  • Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE

    Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE

    Agnes Varda, the legendary eighty-six year-old Belgian filmmaker and artist, is putting the finishing touches to an installation. Towers of lurid plastic buckets and baskets, the pleasing wordplay of “Ping-Pong Tong Camping”, stained glass window panels of flip-flop frisbees, and the photo-puzzle of the Baccalaureate celebrations of naked boys on the beach: Varda’s new work…

  • Ravilious

    Ravilious

    Fashions in art have a way of carrying all before them. They crash into the public consciousness, all splash and spectacle, and it is all too easy, in the rage to reorder and make sense of what ensues, to take epoch-making headlines for the whole story. It is under these conditions that a talent like…