Saturday, November 28, 2015

Freedom For A Song



"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 will make psychogeographic cultural forages through the wider footprint of the former Snibston colliery which is in Coalville, North West Leicestershire. The forages and interventions will be 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."

SNIBSTON DISCOVERY MUSEUM - 2011

Snibston has now been closed down by Leicestershire County Council it sits at this moment closed up with all the people's cultural and heritage artefacts locked up inside.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Circle of Fire the World's First Renga Ramble Sheffield 2007



It's over eight years ago now since artist Anne-Marie Culhane and myself undertook the world's first ever 'Renga Ramble', CIRCLE OF FIRE, in Sheffield.

It was part of the Off The Shelf festival of reading and writing in October 2007 and with / for GROW SHEFFIELD.

Paul Conneally
November 2015

Friday, November 20, 2015

Mosquito At My Ear



Mosquito at my ear—
does he think
I’m deaf?

Kobayashi Issa

1763–1828

from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited and with an introduction by Robert Hass. Copyright 1994 by Robert Hass. Source: The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho Buson and Issa (The Ecco Press, 1994)

Photograph: Paul Conneally, Loughborough, 2015

Sunday, November 15, 2015

RE-TALE: PANDORA - Leicester Highcross Shopping Centre



PANDORA
Paul Conneally
Highcross Shopping Centre
Leicester UK
November 2015

from Paul Conneally's ongoing series of works: RE-TALE 

Sunday, November 08, 2015

The Cinderella Bench - Loughborough 2015



Cinderella had to
help her sisters to
put on their new
dresses and arrange
their hair

The Cinderella Bench is one of eight benches installed in Loughborough as part of the Loogabarooga Festival of Children's Illustration 2015.

Photo: Paul Conneally 2015

Thursday, November 05, 2015

RE-TALE: TAMMY GIRL



The closest I get to going into British Home Stores these days is to walk past it. BHS used to be a landmark shop for ordinary folk with ordinary taste and a patriotic streak, all merchandise proudly claiming to have been made in Britain. Not these days, only the name remains.

The shop looks so dowdy. Boring. Unenticing to the point of drawing me in. I walk over to the entrance but I'm just too late. Peering in I'm glad it's closed. Headless male mannequins in grey suits lounge on white hardboard stands. 

A sign proclaiming 'NEW TAMMY GIRL COLLECTION IS HERE'.

November rain
I finger the horse chestnut
in my pocket

Paul Conneally



from the Paul Conneally's ongoing series of works: RE-TALE