The Zen Bruiser

SNIBSTON PRESERVES - Paul Conneally 2011

From ‘Spoil Heap Harvest’ for Transform Snibston. A series of works exploring art, artefact, product, space, place, time and identity.

ONE UPRIGHT ARM

We move together along the disused railway track
towards the top of the Swannington Incline.

“Don’t look the dog in the eyes. He don’t like it”

one upright arm
sustains the cheek
come walk with me

when things go wrong
there’s always the hedgerow

Paul Conneally 2011 

From ‘Health Walk’ with Nita Pearson ‘Whitwick to Swannington and Back’ May 2011

Previous post in this series “So Looked Cecilia’

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Notes

The line:

‘one upright arm sustains the cheek’

Is a fragment from “HOW RICH THAT FOREHEAD’S CALM EXPANSE” by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth tells us that the poem HOW RICH THAT FOREHEAD’S CALM EXPANSE was inspired by a print at Coleorton Hall, North West Leicestershire. Mrs Wordsworth’s impression was that HOW RICH THAT FOREHEAD’S CALM EXPANSE was also written at Coleorton Hall despite William’s note that it was written at Rydal Mount in the Lake District.

HYPNOTISED

We pass by graffiti daubed concrete. This former mining area has high unemployment. Local youths have become recruitment targets for right wing groups such as the BNP and English Defence League.

Most ignore their advances. Ignore all politics. Some succumb.

Painted words bear witness to their corruption.

under this bridge
weeds grow from the walls
an old flame

such intercourse
brings on a humbler mood

Paul Conneally 2011

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Transform Snibston has reported the graffiti to North West District Council who will hopefully now look to support the Swannington Heritage Trust to clean it up. Transform has also reported the racist terms to the Hate Crime Unit. We’d encourage anyone that finds such material to do similar wherever you live in the UK or the world.

If you live in Leicestershire you can report racist and other hate crimes HERE:

https://forms.leics.gov.uk/af3/an/default.aspx/RenderForm/?F.Name=hswrn4i0ma1&fs2s=ivrTyRMjhWU&fs2c=ooqovKDKoV2&fs2svr=AFE8

NOTES

The three line haiku towards the end of the Hypnotised haibun was written on the Swannington Incline during a Health Walk with Nita Pearson from Whitwick to Swannington and back and was placed first in the Cities of Green Leaves Ginko No Kukai organised to garner support and raise funds for relief for victims of the Japanese Tsunami 2011. Funds raised went to:

Architecture for Humanity
Japanese Red Cross Society
Ngo Jen Official Website
Salvation Army in Japan

Hypnotised comes out of the interaction and connections set up between Conneally, the people on the walk, the area walked through and the William Wordsworth poem ‘How Rich That Forehead’s Calm Expanse’.

Wordsworth walked this area many times when he lived with his familly at Coleorton Hall Farm and during his regualr visits to stay with his friend Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton Hall. Wordsworth tells us that the poem was written at Rydal Mount and inspired by a print at Coleorton Hall. Mrs Wordsworth however says that by her recollection the poem was actually written at Coleorton not Rydal Mount.

Paul Conneally is Cultural Forager for Transform Snibston, Snibston Discovery Museum, Coalville, Leicestershire, UK.

Ghost Writing

Paul Conneally 2012

‘Time is Short’
Paul Conneally 2012

crawling over your window you think I’m confused

‘Fly Gin’ - Paul Conneally 2011

Word Map Circle of Fire

word map tracing the route of the Grow Sheffield / Off The Shelf Renga Ramble from Mushroom Lane (Weston Park Museum) to organic gardening guru Richard Clare’s allotment on Crookes Quarry Allottments. The piece was conceived and led by artist / poets Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally and explores what happens when the renga process is taken from its normal ‘one space’ setting to travelling through an area stopping at various points to write, read and select the poems that go to form what became the ‘A Circle of Fire’ renga. This renga combined the walking/writing process with the one space process - the first 6 stanzas being written during the walk to the allotments where the last 6 stanzas were then written in situ. The renga form used is an adapted Junicho form - a 12 stanza renku form with the schema with its seasonal, moon and love positions written by Culhane & Conneally. The experience of writing a renga, keeping to schema, linking and shifting and walking through ‘this place’ from here to there is a very different experience to writing in one space one place and highlights how the environment the surroundings and people influence the writing process and how the writing - the renga process itself - transforms the space the place in which - and when renga rambling across - that the poem is written. The walking through public space - in this case from a central city location through residential areas to Sheffields urban edge - and the stopping to write, read out loud and the master poet selecting the next stanza before moving on again - highlighted the performative aspect of the process of renga perhaps differently to when in one space where the process is still performative but different. A Circle of Fire embraced both with the last 6 stanzas written in a greenhouse on Richard Clare’s allotment. Nine poets performed / made A Circle of Fire: Paul Conneally (master poet) Anne-Marie Culhane (host poet) Felicity Stout Nadine Wills Joseph Conneally Vanessa Senger Jenny Laird Andrea Allsopp Su Walker

Earthed

‘Taken Hostage By Nature’

Splacist intervention by artists Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally

Loughborough 2012

Staff from Leicester City Learning Services take on board Paul Conneally’s splacist edict to “hold formal meetings anywhere but the office”

Thirty Pieces of Silver by Paul Conneally

A piece composed out of a sample of a small brass jazz band busking in Loughborough Market Square during the making of Crying in the Market by Conneally for The Gallery of the Future in 1999.

“I’m a little lamb that’s lost in the wood” INVIGILATOR : DERBY Paul Conneally 2008

FRUIT ROUTES - Barefoot Blindfold
Anne-Marie Culhane & Paul Conneally
MAY 18th 5am - 8am Loughborough University

Conneally says of the Daybreak event Barefoot Blindfold (at Artists Talking):

“I see this as another strand of my ongoing Memory Foam series in that within the immersive experience we hope to create, emotions, memories and stories will arise from the sounds and silences weaved through the piece.

‘Barefoof Blindfold’ is part of Anne-Marie’s ongoing work FRUIT ROUTES for at Loughborough University a work that I’ve been happy to be a part of over the last six months or so.

Barefoot Blindfold will take place on Friday the 18th of May in and amongst the fruit trees planted in and across the Loughborough University campus during Fruit Routes. It’s a daybreak exxperience starting at 5am in the morning - dawn.

Exact happenings are not yet finalised but meeting at the Pilkington Library participants (it could be you!) are ‘slow walked’ to a Fruit Route orchard area. Here each person chooses and sits with their back against a tree and is blindolded for 30 minutes. It will be dawn and the blindfolding aims to focus our senses on sounds and sensations other than visual. It will we hope be a new way to experience the birdsong of the dawn chorus for instance but all other sounds too.

We thought of how one might ‘draw’ the sound sounds, sensations and emotions in real time while blindfold. The impermanence of dawn, of birdsong, saw us seeking for parallel ways of ‘drawing’ them as we sit blinfold and barefoot backs against our trees. We think we have it now - to draw in air - to move our hands and arms in response to the sounds and the emotions, memories, srories that arise in us. Let the sounds of dawn choreograph the movement.

I can see it in my mind’s eye now a grove of fruit trees each tree with a barefoot blinfold person sat against it, listening and moving their arms arms and hands to the sound of dawn and all it brings.

The second half-hour will be a shift - this time involving the blocking out of sound perhaps - from blind to deaf somehow.

After we have breakfast and share our stories, emotions through the mediation of feedback on the birdsong heard and birds on the campus in general from an RSPB expert on birds.

Any and all of the above is subject to change”.

WE ARE THE SPLACISTS