The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: landscape

  • Wild City Manifesto

    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…

  • Editorial: Radical Landscapes

    Editorial: Radical Landscapes

    Radical Landscapes takes its title from Harriet Tarlo’s seminal collection of British ecopoetries The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) – a collection that came out in the penultimate year of my PhD devoted to Reading and Writing with a Tree: Practising “Nature Writing” as Enquiry, which was itself a radical,…

  • The Look Away

    The Look Away

      Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away     A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…

  • Keep the Ink Moving

    Keep the Ink Moving

    The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…

  • Shadow Sisters

    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…

  • A Wolf, Crossing

    A Wolf, Crossing

    When night falls in the Charente, the inhabitants of its rural villages retreat to their homes. They lock their doors and pull iron-hinged timber shutters over every window. Pale sandstone walls, grey with age, cracked and pitted, their seams of lime mortar dried to dust, become as impenetrable as medieval keeps. In the dark, you…

  • Running with the Wolves

    Running with the Wolves

    When I was a kid I wanted to be a wolf. I think it started when I read Jack London: White Fang and Call of the Wild set loose all kinds of fantasies and imaginings in my young mind that developed into a full-blown desire to swap my human skin for a wolfish replacement. Every…

  • Borders

    Borders

      On the Eve we eat menudo. Onion mimics moon from a small bowl, glinted fractals of itself. Cilantro’s diced flesh lingers in the air. Bolilllos wait, steam rising. We all wait. I have inherited this––my life on this schism of wild land, purple montañas littered by desert primrose, a muddy river and barbed wire…

  • Rooting

    Rooting

      . . . . . . . . . .Chihuahua Desert   Blood slid to soil and our roots splintered wide like needle-edged leaves of agave. We can never escape this desert root, dry to core and apt for bitter survival, snide thirst. A cacti can be barren then, overnight, sprout flame petals, but…

  • How to Make a Map for Ethnic Cleansing

    How to Make a Map for Ethnic Cleansing

      . . . . . . . . . .an elegy   Demark colored lines fluid as the Red sea and place names for distance.. . . . . . . . . .Cherokee–– We are a region where herds wait, swallowing grass like fire. . . . . . . . . .Seminole––…

  • The World Without Us

    The World Without Us

    Deborah Westmancoat is a British contemporary painter based in Somerset, UK. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand landscape and our place within it, particularly how the traditionally held metaphysical stages of alchemy: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubredo (redness) might…