The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: politics

  • Walking in the Sky

    Walking in the Sky

    A small brown kestrel rises over the crest of a hill and pauses, hanging in the wind, scanning the fields below. With a tilt of its wings, it shifts vantage point twice, three times, hangs for a moment, then suddenly slides downwards, a gleam of silver under the high sun. Six foot from the ground,…

  • The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…

  • Life in a Time of Plenty, III

    Life in a Time of Plenty, III

    Part 3: After Now summer is coming around again. Rain is neither surprise nor burden; a clear sky is nothing more than that. Now is a time of plenty: the reservoirs aren’t full but they’re full enough; gardens grow without assistance; crops fail, or flourish, but farming in Australia has always been difficult. There is…