Skin After Skin: February 2012

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The Sanitised City: How Public is Public Space? - Nikki Pugh

The Sanitised City: How Public is Public Space?
Artist Nikki Pugh talks on her work exploring the city via pervasive games, splacist or psychogeographic liminal interventions.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Cultivate

Jo_salter_and_maurice_maguire_at_snibston

Artist Jo Salter visits Snibston to see Paul Conneally’s exhibition The Blind Fiddler Home Entertainment 1806-2012 - Jo is seen here with Transform Snibston lead artist Maurice Maguire.

Later, Salter and Conneally conduct a discourse on Panglossian theory and come to the conclusion, for all kinds of reasons, that yes, "we must cultivate our garden".

Friday, February 03, 2012

Peele Castle In A Storm by Sir George Beaumont

In my show The Blind Fiddler - Home Entertainment 1806-2012 at Snibston Discovery Museum amongst the fridge freezer, slot TV and playstation console you will also also find paintings and drawings from the 18th and 19th century by Sir George Beaumont.

The large oil is Peele Castle in a Storm, a picture that inspired William Wordsworth to write Elgiac Stanzas:

Elgiac Stanzas

I was thy Neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! It seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things.
Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter's hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile!
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss:
Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house, a mine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven: -
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.
Such, in the fond delusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part;
A faith, a trust, that could not be betrayed.

So once it would have been, - 'tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new controul:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanized my Soul.
Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then Beaumont, Friend! Who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This Work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and the dismal shore.
Oh 'tis a passionate Work! - yet wise and well;
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The light'ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
Farewell, farewell the Heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient chear,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. -
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

William Wordsworth
Written May-June 1806
Published 1807

The Blind Fiddler Wordsearch Portrait

See the full gallery on Posterous

The Blind Fiddler Wordsearch Portrait - Paul Conneally 2012

SINGSTAR - The Blind Fiddler Home Entertainment 1806-2012

A visitor to Paul Conneally's Singstar Sitting Room installation in The Blind Fiddler Home Entertainment 1806-2012 exhibition at Snibston Discovery Museum chooses a song to sing.

Then sings it....