The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: walking

  • 12 Circular Walks

    12 Circular Walks

    Having been working on 180 degree panoramic drawings of opposite sides of the Severn, my attention shifted to exploring 360 degree imagery, something more immersive. The all-seeing eye of the 360 degree lens is hard to hide from. I began to frame myself within the ‘dome’, initially in stills, copying the posture of Caspar David…

  • The Wandering Walk

    The Wandering Walk

    The Wandering Walk is a site-specific installation located on the South Fyn Danish Island of Ærø. It engages with the familiar practice of walking as a mode of perception to explore and enrich the complex and shifting relationships between humans and nature. The installation is focused around the celebrated northern region of Vitsø. Frequently walked…

  • Open call: Root Mapping

    Open call: Root Mapping

      *** Root Mapping is currently closed for submissions. We will reopen again soon. You can sign up to our newsletter for updates. ***     There is no map to the place we are going. We will be lost for a good, long time. — Eva Saulitis, Becoming Earth (2016)   Between Vermont’s Green…

  • A Line / Align

    A Line / Align

    “A walk marks time with an accumulation of footsteps. It defines the form of the land. Walking the roads and paths is to trace a portrait of the country…” – Richard Long, Selected Statements and Interviews, Haunch of Venison Press, 2007     There is a rich history underfoot, and the very act of walking is…

  • We Were Strangers

    We Were Strangers

    A friend of mine passed away a few months ago and, although we were never especially close, his death affected me deeply. For a time afterwards I found myself impelled, on my lunch breaks, to leave the office block in central Manchester where I work and spend an hour walking – briskly yet purposelessly –…

  • Rethinking Mythogeography

    Rethinking Mythogeography

    I first came across Phil Smith in Walking, Writing and Performance, in which he appears as ‘The Crab Man’, an alter ego also credited as one of the contributors to 2010’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways: a collection of fragmentary narratives that construct and deconstruct an approach to walking as an artistic practice, a…

  • Keep the Ink Moving

    Keep the Ink Moving

    The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…

  • Ghosts on the Shore

    Ghosts on the Shore

    Identities – of people and of places – form slowly over time, through the sedimentary accretion of multiple overlapping layers. Even the oldest or most deeply buried stories never entirely disappear. Sometimes it takes the archaeologist, or the psychoanalyst, to do a little digging. Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore enacts a sustained process of…

  • The Old Weird Albion

    The Old Weird Albion

    Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…

  • Running with the Wolves

    Running with the Wolves

    When I was a kid I wanted to be a wolf. I think it started when I read Jack London: White Fang and Call of the Wild set loose all kinds of fantasies and imaginings in my young mind that developed into a full-blown desire to swap my human skin for a wolfish replacement. Every…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    I had no intention of bicycling in the snow, this winter. I started riding just seven months ago to stave off the inevitable corrosion of old age. I have no tolerance of cold. I grew up on the beaches of Sydney, where anything below 15ºC is thought of as gelid. In Berlin, the average winter…