The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: landscape

  • Tasked to Hear

    Tasked to Hear

    On 30th March 2013 Mark Peter Wright made his way to a point in South Gare – a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of reclaimed land to the south of Teesmouth – and stopped. He made a note of the conditions (temperature, wind speed, humidity) and of his own body temperature. At 12pm, he switched on his audio…

  • The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…

  • The Story of a Single Rock

    The Story of a Single Rock

    Like many stories, this one begins with a rock, in fact one rock amongst many: the shifting shingle which geographically defines and continually redefines the salt marshes of Orford Ness. When contemporary artist Anya Gallaccio made her first trip to the shingle spit of the Ness, it was not the accidental sculptures of wire and…

  • To Solve Such An Equation

    To Solve Such An Equation

    Seven Counter-clockwise Turns Around Ruin Lust   Have you ever known a place which seemed to have no beginning and no end? Paul Nash, Monster Field     1. The first time I walked to Chanctonbury Ring, it was whole. A proud bristle of beech trees sprouting from an Iron Age fort atop the West…

  • To Leave a Light Impression

    To Leave a Light Impression

    An exhibition of large-scale landscape photographs of ethereal beauty opens today at the Bermondsey Street outpost of White Cube. Darren Almond’s latest work follows on from his last solo show with the gallery, 2008’s Moons of the Iapetus Ocean, and includes images taken as far afield as Patagonia, Tasmania and Cape Verde. The heart of…

  • Trevor Kiernander

    Trevor Kiernander

    It wasn’t until he told me that I made the connection. I’m not sure whether I should tell you though. Whether it changes the experience of seeing too much. Knowing that many images are abstracted from photographs. From thumbnails of Tracey Emin taken from the BBC news website. From a photograph of his girlfriend, laughing…

  • Hidden Landscapes Project

    Hidden Landscapes Project

    “Over the course of 12 months, beginning September 2012, eight sites located within and around Letchworth Garden City were explored and narrowed down to four (Sites 1, 2, 3 and 6). These were then ‘excavated’ as part of the Hidden Landscapes Project.” And so begins Christina Bryant’s report, in which the artist-investigator provides a painstaking…