The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: wood

  • A Receptive Walk

    A Receptive Walk

    Audio, photography and text by artist Jessica Emsley from A Receptive Walk, an artistic exercise to disrupt the usual rhythms of more-than-human communication.

  • Breathing Trees

    Breathing Trees

    On a writing residency in the Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon, Gavin Van Horn embraces the vital possibilities of more-than-human perspectives.

  • almost like almost

    almost like almost

      almost like almost . . . . . . . he said in land there is a line around a wolf within is other and awe social grace packed who wills foul and unrest . . . . . . . when the chaste self ills the line extends skin to no where inside…

  • She-Wolf, Kauttua 1963

    She-Wolf, Kauttua 1963

    For three nights the she-wolf skirted the village. Must be desperate, to leave the forest, her cubs must be starving. The men oiled their guns, waxed their skis, took their time, an easy target this one, no hurry. When she howled, her ahh oww, oww, owwww sliced through the still air, sliced right through the…

  • To howl

    To howl

        Inspired by and sourced from ‘Ash’ by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, in Relics (Broughton Mills: Corbel Stone Press, 2013). Image credit: John Morgan, Ruins of Drosgol Farmstead, at the foot of Pumlumon (Plynlimon) on the banks of Nant-y-moch Reservoir, near Aberystwyth Part of The Learned Pig’s Wolf Crossing editorial season, spring/summer 2017….

  • Tame

    Tame

      the skin peels off my face ……………..Cheap tears of bone organs collapsing, unlace then stitch ligaments. moving spinal columns ……………..I watch my body remove my inner symptoms then cover up pushing against stretched leather ……………..Cut me up for fun in amongst the forest heather displace the poison red staining pale white ……………..Teeth elongating reaching…

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • Lines in the Ice

    Lines in the Ice

    Human Marks in the Ice Ships fighting against a freezing sea. Masts and ropes caked in ice. Crews of men hauling sledges over crumpled and broken landscapes. These are the mental images conjured when many think of the Arctic and the history of its exploration by Europeans, Russians and Americans. However, this is not the…

  • Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School

    Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School

    Fungi are unusual. They are easier to define through a process of elimination, by identifying what they are not. They are not animal, mineral or vegetable, but ‘fruiting bodies’, strange forms of life growing out of decay, with their own fecund vocabulary: hymenium, volva, universal veil, inner veil, sporangium, spore, apocethium. Since beginning my artist…

  • 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…

  • Touching Wood

    Touching Wood

    Rarely do curators at large public museums co-ordinate concurrent exhibitions to complement each other. But by chance or design, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is bucking the trend. Of the half-dozen or so solo exhibitions currently on show, there are three which share a common material interest: wood. They form, if…