The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: animals

  • Mapping the In-Betweens

    Mapping the In-Betweens

    By the time I was seven I had moved house four times in three countries on two continents. A few years later, I found myself dropped into another new place: a summer spent in Čelákovice, a small town in the Czech Republic. Culture shock, the hollowness of first-time jetlag, feeling so fragile and porous that…

  • Endlings: Drawing Extinction

    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…

  • A Place That Mattered

    A Place That Mattered

    The place where my son died had horses. Only because when a dying boy asks you for a horse, you find more than one. You make your way away from the busyness of your town beside the wide river to land in the mountains that is not your own. There you watch the horses wander…

  • Museum: Ursus americanus

    Museum: Ursus americanus

    On birches, bears, and the birth of farm animals: three new poems by Todd Davis.

  • Animals Out of Place

    Animals Out of Place

    There’s a post on Instagram; a photo mottled with gallery reflections, close-up and a little oblique. It shows a vintage glass slide of a zookeeper and his charge. It’s not the best image but has an instant power. The keeper, wearing a peaked cap and a stern expression, holds high a short, straight chain. On…

  • Open Call: Rot

    Open Call: Rot

      *** Rot is currently closed for submissions. We will reopen again soon. You can sign up to our newsletter for updates. ***     The world is full of both collaborations and contaminations. The evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis tells us that we are born of indigestion; some 2 billion years ago, one bacterial cell…

  • love poetry: the slug edit

    love poetry: the slug edit

    I offer words of love to water, and to the place where it emerges, streams, out of the earth. One small book (precious), A Little Treasury of Love Lyrics – 1963, 79 pages, Pictorial pale blue dust jacket over red cloth boards, is lain on the moss bank, beside the stream — by the sermon-spilling…

  • Nature Studies

    Nature Studies

        Plants Plants are deceptive. You see them there looking as if once rooted they know their places; not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces. Yet from the way they breed (excuse me!) and twine, from their exhibitionist and rather prolific nature, we must infer a sinister not to say imperialistic…

  • Archiving garden sounds

    Archiving garden sounds

    Every time I visit Australia, my home country, my senses are overwhelmed with the smell of native plants and the sound of native animals. The morning after I arrive, I am usually woken by a fury of local bird going about their morning ritual, perched in a tree in the garden just outside my window….

  • VIDEO: Pigs at Play

    VIDEO: Pigs at Play

        This is part of CARNEVALE, a collaborative art-science project that explores animal welfare questions and the enthusiasm of pigs for investigative play. Click to see the rest.      

  • The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…