The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Author: Francesca Brooks

  • Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE

    Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE

    Agnes Varda, the legendary eighty-six year-old Belgian filmmaker and artist, is putting the finishing touches to an installation. Towers of lurid plastic buckets and baskets, the pleasing wordplay of “Ping-Pong Tong Camping”, stained glass window panels of flip-flop frisbees, and the photo-puzzle of the Baccalaureate celebrations of naked boys on the beach: Varda’s new work…

  • A Needle Walks into a Haystack

    A Needle Walks into a Haystack

    Sound carries. And it is the sounds of political and social unrest that offer one of the most interesting threads for navigating this year’s Liverpool Biennial – a constellation of exhibitions, events and curatorial side-shows grouped under the title, A Needle Walks into a Haystack. The Biennial’s greatest achievement is its power to make you…

  • 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…