Category: Art
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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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Chanctonbury Rings
Chanctonbury Rings is a new spoken word and music project on Ghost Box Records by the poet and writer Justin Hopper and folk musician Sharron Kraus, and featuring Ghost Box’s own Belbury Poly. The album is based on live performances of Hopper’s book The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins, 2017), a poetic and…
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Foregathered wi’ the beast
I am standing in a lay-by of the A9, 2 miles north of Brora. I am face to face, for the first time, with a stone that I encountered a photograph of a year earlier, in a book about the wondrous wildlife of Scotland. Paving slabs ascend the bank to a hefty lump of granite…
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Hildaland
Hildaland is a hidden island, said to rise in the mist between two tides. When spotted by a sailor, they had to sail towards it without taking their eyes off it, for if they did it would vanish. There have been very few sightings of vanishing islands in recent years, however few have been looking….
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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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Scrub
Beyond the chain-link fence of my primary school, across the alleyway into town, was a land of fascination. We called it the ‘waste ground’ and I’d wander there looking for treasures among the broken fireplaces and scuffed concrete. Garden survivors rose from the cracks and dust: snapdragons, evening primrose, mullein. This was suburban south-west London….
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Wild City Manifesto
the wild city is only the past repeating * wildness doesn’t begin or end at the edge of the city * the wild doesn’t shut at 10pm * wild things have their own sequence * bring back the seasons! * our material existence cannot be sustained without wildness * the wild city reverses destiny…
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Space Shifters
The smell of engine oil lingers sharply in my nostrils, hours after I have left the vertiginous room of Richard Wilson’s 20:50, the final coup de théâtre in the Hayward Gallery’s Space Shifters exhibition. My mind keeps returning to the glassy, treacherous surface of the oil, which fills the room to half-way up the wall…
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Un(in)tended Garden
Notes on that which grows without us Urbs en Horto – City in a Garden – that is my town’s motto. To its architects, this was a matter of greenspace and planned esplanades sprinkled throughout the sprawl of a relentless grid. To me, it is more a statement of symmetry, if not synonymity, in the…
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Feral Phytocracy
Vegetal Apparitions for the 21st Century Late May, about a month into my three-month residency at the Nida Art Colony (NAC) in Lithuania, a thought from my incessant internal monologue stopped me dead in my tracks. As most afternoons, if the swarms of mosquitoes permitted, I had been wandering along the sandy paths criss-crossing the…
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Gardens Speak
The Political Performance of Mourning Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation based on the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in gardens across Syria during the first two years of the uprising. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories,…