'Quality!' - Brian's Fruit and Veg Stall

Brian's Fruit and Veg Stall
Paul Conneally
Loughborough Market
January 31st 2015

Brian sells all manner of fruit and vegetables from his stall on Loughborough Market but he is most famous for his cry of 'Fresh bananas!' followed quickly by 'Quality!' Over and over again.

The market just wouldn't be the same without Brian's voice ringing out across the market and through the crowds of shoppers that throng Loughborough's vibrant market each Thursday and Saturday.

Yes, quality indeed!

cold cold fingers
the stall holder sips
his parsnip soup

Paul Conneally

The Set Up - Jeffrey Kaufman and Tony Nelson

'The Set Up' - Jeffrey Kaufman and Tony Nelson
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery
Leicester, January, 2015

Jeffrey Kaufman and Tony Nelson unpacking and setting up the banners that form part of Leicester's Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 Exhibition. The banners explain about the Holocaust and other genocides. They accompany an exhibition of excellent artworks from pupils at Rushey Mead Secondary School that runs from the 22nd January to the 3rd of February 2015.

The exhibition was curated and hung by artist Claire Jackson.

I enjoyed very much working with Claire, Jeffrey, Tony and everyone else involved in putting up the show.

It really is well worth a visit!

Paul Conneally
January 22 2015

Shuntaro Netsu of ホッチキス HOTCHKISS

Shuntaro Netsu of ホッチキス HOTCHKISS
Paul Conneally
Kings Cross, London
January 2015

Only The Moon by ホッチキス HOTCHKISS

Early Memories of Asian Residents of Loughborough

The Loughborough Reminiscence Group has published a new DVD 'Early Memories of Asian Residents’ as part of its continuing work to capture elements of Loughborough's rich history through people's stories.

The 2 disc DVD features nine interviews with members of some the Asian communities of Loughborough. All the people interviewed arrived in Loughborough between 1963 and 1975. The contributors are from the Gujarati Hindu, Punjabi Hindu, Punjabi Sikh and Bangladeshi communities.

The DVD provides fascinating insight on Loughborough's rich multicultural heritage and also features over a 100 photographs of family life and community events that the participants took part in during their time in Loughborough.

The DVD package contains excellent source material that local schools could incorporate into many areas of their curriculum but that any other person, from Loughborough or not, will find interesting.

Copies of the DVD cost £10, and are available from Loughborough Reminiscence Group by calling Mike Jones on 01509 843433.

Paul Conneally

Cultural Forager
15 January 2015

Know Your Onions - The Kitchen Orchard

Know Your Onions
Paul Conneally
Rushey Mead School
2014

The guys from G4S arrive back at work at Rushey Mead Secondary School in Leicester to find all their onion tops eaten. They are perplexed. Is it mice? Rabbits? Maybe the pigeons? It's a mystery. Not downhearted they resolve to hoe the ground and try again. Maybe netting the crop would help? A pigeon pie might just do it!

The land is on the developing Rushey Mead Kitchen Orchard site which at the moment is just a twinkling in the eyes of cultural forager Paul Conneally and the management of the school. An orchard in the footprint of the old kitchen and dining rooms. An orchard of heritage apple varieties associated with Leicestershire. This forms part of the wider vision for the school grounds as an edible landscape.

Watch this space!

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit No.2

The Polarity of Matter and Spirit No.2
Hughes and Conneally
New Parks, Leicester
November 2014

"No dead shark or calf ... a person waiting perhaps for the number 14 ... only willing to be photographed when shown how the surface of the shelter would actually make her hard to recognise"

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit is a series of portraits taken in The New Parks Involuntary Painting Bus Shelter Photo Booth. It comes out of work through the ongoing Involuntary Painting Movement initiated by artists, Millree Hughes (New York, US) and Paul Conneally (Loughborough, UK).

'Involuntary Painting' is a term coined by Hughes in 2014 to identify and explore what an alien that landed on Earth, programmed with all the knowledge of art but never having seen any, might possibly mistake for a painting. This notion is used by Hughes and Conneally, along with a growing group of artists, to explore the nature, history and future of painting, space, place, time and more widely, art in in the twenty first century.

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit portraits are photographed by Conneally through the scratched and marked perspex side of a bus shelter on Charnor Road, New Parks, Leicester. It is this surface that is the involuntary painting, not the portrait photograph itself. The subject is photographed through the involuntary painting which acts as a lens come filter in in the physical space between the digital camera, in this case an iPhone, and the subject in the bus shelter.

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit identifies the bus shelter on Charnor Road, New Parks, Leicester, UK, the bus shelter towards the New Parks Social Club end of the road and on the same side of the road as Forest Lodge Primary School, as the first Involuntary Painting Photo Booth. Hughes and Conneally are in the process of identifying, with others, similar Involuntary Painting Booths around the world.

A further series of portraits taken in the New Parks Involuntary Painting Bus Shelter Painting Booth will be undertaken in 2015 by Hughes and Conneally as part of Involuntary Painting 1 New Parks : New York with and for Soft Touch Arts, New Parks Library and members of the New Parks community.

Fight For Every Heartbeat

British Heart Foundation
Nottingham
Paul Conneally
2015