The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: taxidermy

  • 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.

  • Museum: Ursus americanus

    Museum: Ursus americanus

    On birches, bears, and the birth of farm animals: three new poems by Todd Davis.

  • The monstrous body

    The monstrous body

    Scary Monsters II: global greed and the gluttonous dodo Monsters are not just things that lurk under the bed. They are powerful images that have always been used to represent the things we might not want to face in ourselves, as individuals or as communities. Different monsters have represented different fears or anxieties in  different…

  • Foxing

    Foxing

    Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of snow, and making a springing high-dive pounce to catch it, such that my tail waves vertically, joyfully, ludicrously, in the air above me.    …

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    Anton Newcombe, leader of the psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio is just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte begins to meld with the predominantly Turkish, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding. I sometimes cycle there for a late…

  • Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo

    Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo

    In the western hemisphere, polar bears have lived in our midst since the Middle Ages, a result of our fascination with these charismatic carnivores. Already in 1252, Henry III of England kept a muzzled and chained polar bear, which was allowed to catch fish and frolic about in the Thames. The first unequivocally identifiable polar…

  • Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection

    Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection

    Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…

  • Plant Migrations

    Plant Migrations

    With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…

  • (Re)Imagining the Insect

    (Re)Imagining the Insect

    54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another!   Jacques Derrida, Typewriter Ribbon, 1998   It is all very…

  • 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…