The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: London

  • Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits

    Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits

    Taking place this October – just in time for Hallowe’en – is a two-week festival of esoteric art, entitled I:MAGE 2014, that promises to explore the fertile relationship between artists and spirit entities. If the world of the esoteric can often seem closed off (almost by definition) then I:MAGE 2014 goes some way towards breaking…

  • Fungiculture

    Fungiculture

    This summer sees the launch of a brand new academic journal: Fungiculture. Subtitled “A Journal for Psychedelic Culture Studies” Fungiculture was conceived over the past six months or so by a group of course-mates from Goldsmiths in order to provide, in their words, “a space for the experimental and playful cultivation of ideas and practices,…

  • Phytology

    Phytology

    “And though thou seemst a weedling wild – Wild and neglected like to me – Thou still art dear to nature’s child And I will stoop to notice thee For oft like thee, in wild retreat, Arrayed in humble garb like thee, There’s many a seeming weed proves sweet As sweet as garden flowers can…

  • Journals and Imprints Fair

    Journals and Imprints Fair

      Sunday 22nd June, Noon – 4pm The Peckham Pelican FREE!   This June, The Learned Pig is delighted to be co-hosting a Sunday afternoon journals and imprints fair, as part of the week-long Literary Kitchen Festival. Taking place at the Peckham Pelican in south London, the fair features a host of our favourite independent…

  • Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    On my way back from the gallery I took a train and experienced the usual flicker of annoyance when the conductor began speaking to us as if we were in a plane. He gave the estimated arrival time, pointed us to the safety notices, alerted us to any suspicious looking bags. It was the usual…

  • Arkhipelagos

    Arkhipelagos

    There is a sense of relief, upon leaving this exhibition, of being palpably bound up with pavement, sky and, a few short paces away, the murky heave and rush of the Thames with its welcome damp rising. A skeleton hull of a boat, displayed on the banks of the Thames, ghosts the space from which…

  • 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…

  • No one dives in me

    No one dives in me

      Seven things I’ve learned from 20 years as a community swimming pool. As told to Kit Caless.     When I’m cold I’m lonely. When I’m cold, the black brick sat on my bottom has no person to pick it up. They put a sign outside that says, “The pool is currently at 26…

  • Objects in the Field

    Objects in the Field

    Collaboration between the arts and the sciences is both increasingly prominent and, perhaps as a consequence, increasingly problematic. Projects and practices describing themselves as interdisciplinary collaborations are on the rise, in part as a result of funding availability. But it’s also more complex than that: art is always drawn to power, and few institutions in…

  • 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…

  • London Art Fair 2014

    London Art Fair 2014

    There’s something reassuring about London Art Fair. The last couple of years have been a particularly turbulent time for London’s galleries. As the big names continue to multiply (Pace, Victoria Miro, David Zwirner etc), some of London’s most consistently innovative spaces have shuddered to a halt. All the while London Art Fair continues, offering up…