Author: The Learned Pig
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Recollecting Landscapes
Rephotography, Memory and Transformation 1904-1980-2004-2014 Recollecting Landscapes documents over a century of landscape transformation in Flanders. The first step of the project dates from the early twentieth century, when Jean Massart (1865-1925), a professor of botany at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), initiated the photographic documentation of the Belgian landscape through…
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Cereal
Once, more than 10,000 years ago, Triticum – cereal – was a wild-growing genus with many varieties. Due to their nutritious grains, some of these varieties were cultivated by humans. The resulting access to a more structured food source lead to a whole new form of living, eating and digesting. A process that simultaneously affected…
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Endlings: Drawing Extinction
There are many different approaches to drawing animals. In particular there was a shift in the 19th century away from French idealism towards an approach, led by British artists such as Edward Lear, that prioritised drawing direct from nature. The work of Amy Dover, a fine artist and illustrator based in Newcastle, England, draws upon…
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Announcing…
The Learned Pig is changing. Since launching in November 2013, The Learned Pig has taken an instinctive approach to editorial. We have published what feels right to us and we have published as often as we can. We are very proud of the work we have done so far and the brilliant people we have…
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Join The Learned Pig!
The Learned Pig is looking for two new section editors to take a lead as we expand and adapt our editorial offering over the course of 2019. Each new section editor will take charge of one editorial thread and help to shape its direction. Currently these are art, thinking, nature, writing, but we will be…
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Of Shadows
One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Effigies, pentacles, masks and charms. Robes and blades, crosses and cauldrons. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, is a treasure trove of magical objects and books dedicated to the history of British folk magic and other forms of popular spiritual belief. Photographer…
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Shadow Sisters
A pack of dogs, a suggestion of a transformation, a woman in a wild place. A wolf. In the analogue photography of Joanna Pallaris, the time, as Hamlet had it, is out of joint. Double exposures make visible the formation of a rock face through the head of a dog. A woman’s face – the…
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Shortening the Candle’s Wick I
Realisation I lie in the rich grass a blissful ringing in my head. Distant voices bring me food the way ants brought gold to a king in olden times. There are two horseflies. There may even be a snake around here somewhere. In any case there is an old mill-pond and downstream are some…
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Shortening the Candle’s Wick II
Over the wet alders the wind gallops along the road raging, swinging a club. Then tired out in the high pines’ lap like a child after crying still sobs. Wet, the colour of tree trunks, lifting up her skirt’s hem, the old woman quietly goes. Gathered from roadside bilberry shrubs in her billy can the…
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Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns
Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth category: unknown knowns – the things we don’t realise we know; the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine our perceptions and actions. Unknown Knowns continues…
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The Way of Florida
Russell Persson’s The Way of Florida is a compact, driving, rhythmical work – a novel, but quite unlike most. The book revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition of the sixteenth century, which saw a group of some 600 Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese explorers arrive on the coast of Florida intent on establishing preliminary colonial settlements and…