Apple Peel Poetry Installation - Paul Conneally 2014

Initial sketch plan for making ‘Involuntary Apple Peel Poems’ a performative, collaborative art intervention - Paul Conneally, Loughborough University Fruit Route, October 2014.

Visitors to the Fruit Route were asked by Conneally to select an apple and peel it trying to do so in ‘one peel’ trying to get as long an apple peeling as possible.

The length was measured in centimetres and this with the persons age was used to find a quote in a book of Wordsworth poetry that was then changed by replacing nouns with apple or Apples.

The new poems were hung with the peel that helped create them on the Landscaping and Gardening Society Shed as poetry installation.

The apples were then pressed on site by Transition Loughborough to make apple juice and cider.

Container Drivers

Look at a car park for two days
Look at a grey port for two days
Train line, stone and grey
Train line, stone and grey,

they're

Uh-containers and their drivers
Uh-containers and their drivers
Uh-containers and their drivers

Mark E. Smith

Lyric excerpt from Container Drivers by The Fall

Image:
'Container Drivers'
Digital photograph of a photograph in the book Renegade
Paul Conneally 2015

Thirty Pieces of Silver - Paul Conneally 1999

Lunch in Loughborough Market - Paul Conneally 2015


THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER - Paul Conneally 1999

Artist / Poet Paul Conneally created this audio piece out of field recordings made during a psychogeography drift or splacist exploration as Conneally prefers to term it, through Loughborough Market. It features the sound of a three-piece busking jazz band that he passed during the drift. The piece seeks to convey the mood set up in the artist as he passed through the market through the sounds. The piece forms part of a larger piece created out of the drift in video and audio for The Gallery of The Future.

What is Haiku?

'What is haiku?'

Paul Conneally talks in Loughborough with poets Debi Bender and Susumu Takiguchi,later editing out his own voice to better hear Debi and Susumu.

Hear the interview here: What Is Haiku? 

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/haikumania/conneallytakiguchibender.mp3

Ghosts

Around the end of a chain link fence, a dark place of rushing water.

The Stonebow Bridge, also known as the Monk’s Bridge for this is the path they used, off to tend their livestock in the days before the dissolution of the monasteries.

We listen for ghosts.

acorns


on the old stone bridge


she fastens his coat

Paul Conneally


First World Haiku Festival Ginko

Loughborough, 2000

Stacked - George Sfougaras

'Paul Conneally' by George Sfougaras

Part of George's experiments with light and dark - acrylic paint on birch board then cut up into squares and recombined... for me the work also works when stacked...


'Stacked Portrait of Paul Conneally' - George Sfougaras

George Sfougaras works out of his studio in the new and brilliant Leicester Print Workshop where continually explores the possibilities of painting, print, art.

Contextually Happy

Contextually Happy - Paul Conneally December 2 2015

Contextually Unhappy - Paul Conneally December 2 2015

Both windows are in the old Towles Building, a former hosiery factory in Loughborough, UK.

The building is a 'locally' listed building. In the Charnwood Borough Council listing one part of the building in terms of fenestration (windows) and brickwork is described as 'contextually unhappy'. The other part of the building we must assume is then 'contextually happy'.

I visited the building, which now hosts the wonderful furniture recycling charity SOFA, to see the Nine Frames Project, a project that sees part of the top floor host an 'unrestricted' art show and happening space devised and curated by artist Thomas Walker with other art students from Loughborough University. It was in preparing for this visit, with artist photographer Kev Ryan of Charnwood Arts, that I discovered the official listing description of the building and for the first time the term 'contextually unhappy'. It immediately struck home with me, it's unwritten counterpoint too 'contextually happy'.

A text piece came to mind the words 'CONTEXTUALLY UNHAPPY' perhaps on a banner, hand painted or otherwise on a bed sheet or some other substrate or echoing the nearby Brush factory, a neon sign, hung on the unhappy side of the building. Another 'CONTEXTUALLY HAPPY' hung on the happy side of the building, the Nottingham Road frontage, straight opposite the busy T-junction if possible.

It opens the possibility of a psychogeography type, a splacist drift, through areas labelling stuff contextually happy or unhappy, based on our own reaction to things in relation to other things around them.

Catalogues and maps.

Talking it through with Kev I begin to get drawn more to the 'CONTEXTUALLY HAPPY' slogan.

Yes I'd wear a T-Shirt with that on it. Better make some.

Paul Conneally
Loughborough, UK
December 3, 2015

Additional Material:

 

Charnwood Borough Council Local Listing Text:

"Hosiery Factory. Late C19 with C20 addition (on Clarence St). Red/brown brick with piers and terra-cotta cornice surmounting stone string course. Quite plain. Substantial stone dressed neoclassical entrance set within rounded corner ?tower? linking workshops. Flat roof with upstanding parapet and shaped gable to corner tower. 3 storeys. 10 bays fronting Nottingham Road, 6 bays fronting Clarence St (excluding extension). Prominent square boiler stack with corbelled head. Original small paned metal windows largely preserved. Extension in style of original but fenestration and brick colour contextually unhappy."