Freedom For A Song

Freedom For A Song - Paul Conneally 2011

Freedom For A Song comes from INDIFFERENT, a series of prints, images and texts, by artist, poet and cultural forager Paul Conneally. INDIFFERENT emerges from cultural forages in and around Snibston Discovery Park and the villages that surround it. The forages form part of the process underpinning Spoil Heap Harvest a piece commissioned by Snibston as part of TRANSFORM.

INDIFFERENT sees Conneally juxtaposing the poetry of the playwright and poet Francis Beaumont, who was born in Thringston, North West Leicestershire, with not frottages but presages of plant and other materials, made on a cultural forage through the Snibston Colliery spoil heap, now a country park. The artist invites the viewer to seek for pictures within the presaged image in the same way that a psychologist might ask a patient to look for images in the famous Rorschach or Ink Blot Test. What can you see? You can report back to the artist what you feel the image to be by email: little.onion@ntlworld.com or by commenting on this page using the comment form.

Throughout Spoil Heap Harvest Conneally makes psychogeographic cultural forages through the wider footprint of the former Snibston colliery which is in Coalville, North West Leicestershire. The forages and interventions  mediated by the poetry of William Wordsworth, Francis Beaumont and the paintings of John Constable. All three of these cultural giants deeply connected with the area in ways for the most part unknown by local and wider communities.

Wordsworth lived in the area, with his whole family, for a whole year and it was at Coleorton that he first read his completed masterpiece, The Prelude, to Coleridge. Constable, Sir Walter Scott and many other famous artists and writers clamoured to North West Leicestershire to stay with George Beaumont at his home Coleorton Hall, just down the road from Snibston. George Beaumont himself was the lead benefactor for the setting up the National Gallery in London.

Paul Conneally is cultural forager at Snibston Discovery Museum for TRANSFORM SNIBSTON.

The Indifferent

Never more will I protest,

To love a woman but in jest:

For as they cannot be true,

So, to give each man his due,

When the wooing fit is past

Their affection cannot last.

Therefore, if I chance to meet

With a mistress fair and sweet,

She my service shall obtain,

Loving her for love again:

Thus much liberty I crave,

Not to be a constant slave.

But when we have tried each other,

If she better like another,

Let her quickly change for me,

Then to change am I as free.

He or she that loves too long

Sell their freedom for a song. 

Francis Beaumont