painted wall

Double Vision

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

This piece is on the same office-building as the ‘Be Your Best’ piece featured previously (in Auld Cobblers) at the city-side entrance to east Belfast, at the junction of Middlepath Street and Newtownards Road. Both are by Dee Craig/Belfast Mural Arts (Fb) as part of East Belfast Enterprise’s (web | ig) ‘Connecting Communities Through Art’ initiative. The two works were officially launched together on April 20th (pics on EBE’s Instagram). The two in-progress shots (last below) are from April 16th.

According to this Community NI article, the work has been installed using “a jigsaw-like technique using super strength glue to give it a lifespan of up to 25 years before requiring maintenance”.

Interpretations of the new piece are encouraged; feel free to comment or e-mail.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X15029 X15027 [X15028]

Spinning Memories

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

The inspiration for this new piece of street art by KMG (ig) was the Strand Spinning Mill (formerly the Jaffe Spinning Mill) which closed in 1983 and is now the Portview Trade Centre. During WWI the mill made munitions and during WWII viscose rayon. The film Lint And Linen (youtube) covers both pre-industrial and mechanical linen-production (though mostly focused on yarn from line fibres rather than from tow, which was the Strand mill’s claim to fame (Duffy Rafferty)); the painting appears to present a more primitive and imaginary age in which fibres could be spun using the human hand.

For photographs of the old mill on the Trade Centre, see previously the image of A Block in Strand Spinning Mill.

“Spinning memories” is the name of a planned collection of stories for an archive at Portview (Portview Stories).

Townsley Street, east Belfast, next to the Narnia sculptures and facing Aslan Is On The Move.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X15025 X15026 X15024

Westlife

Extramural Activity2 Comments

“Another winter day/has come and gone away/In either Paris and [or] Rome/And I wanna go home” – words from the Michael Bublé-penned song ‘Home’ which boy-band Westlife released on its 2007 album, Back Home. For Egan, Feehily, and Filan, home is, or was, Sligo — the three went to Summerhill secondary school and were together in earlier bands; Byrne (and Bryan/Brian McFadden who was a member of the group from 1998 to 2004 but is not included in the mural) is from Dublin (WP).

“With a career spanning twenty years, Westlife are, Shane Filan, Nicky Byrne, Kian Egan and Mark Feehily. A true pop phenomenon with more number 1 hits than any other act apart from The Beatles and Elvis, Westlife have sold 50 million albums worldwide.”

The mural is behind Gilooly Hall, on Temple Street, Sligo. It was painted in 2015 by Kelan Curran (TAPA).

Previously from Sligo: Maud Gonne.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X15006 X15005

Committees Of The Rich

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

“Governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.” So wrote James Connolly in an August 1914 piece in the Irish Worker entitled ‘The War Upon The German nation’ (marxists.org), in which he contended that Britain was using its remaining area of superiority – military might – in order to crush the now-superior German capitalism, science, and labour. (It’s not clear whether, for Connolly’s purposes, Germany’s is a capitalist society.)

“Big” Jim Larkin is also shown, with his arms outstretched, as seen in the photograph included in We Only Want The Earth.

Nik Purdy/Blow Designs (ig), on the Mall, Sligo, next to The Model.

Also in Sligo: Maud Gonne | Westlife

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X15000c X15001 X15000

Along The Shannon River

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

Leitrim’s “literary heritage” is recognised by this large mural by Nik Purdy/Blow Designs (ig) in Main Street, Carrick-On-Shannon. Clockwise from top we see portraits and quotes from …

Canon [William] Slator: “You’ll never find more beauty/Peace and welcome all combined/Than along the Shannon River/where your cares are left behind.”

Nora J Murray: “There are silver waters lapping/Under arches grey and brown/When the swans come up the river/To the bridge in Carrick town”

John McGahern: “I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth.” (2000 interview)

MJ McManus: “The people came to drink the soup/Ladled from greasy bowls/They died in whitewashed wards that held/A thousand Irish souls” (from the poem ‘Eighteen Forty-Nine’)

Susan Mitchell: “No bigger than a bulrush./I beside the rushy Shannon cry./There are no children on the shore./The singing voices sing no more./The sea draws all the rivers down./And love has sailed from Carrick town.” (from the poem ‘Carrick’ – Google Books)

The monument in front of the mural is also to Mitchell.

Purdy also did Committees Of The Rich in Sligo.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14995 [X14996]

Tosaíonn An Domhan Ar Leac An Doraıs

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

“Think global, act local – [the world begins on the doorstep]”. This environmental message is by UV Arts (ig) at Buncrana Youth Club, Castle Avenue, Buncrana, Co. Donegal (Inish Live), painted for Children In Crossfire (web | see also Derry Lama, A Wall For All, and Break The Bias).

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Andy McDonagh/Eclipso Pictures (ig | Fb)
X14972 X14971 [X14973] X14974

Auld Cobblers

Extramural Activity1 Comment

This new three-storey mural by Dee Craig (Fb) is at the city end of Newtownards Road and so serves as a highly-visible introduction to east Belfast. People arriving in the area are now greeted with a vintage image of a smiling bearded man in a cloth cap, surrounded by occupations from the industrial era: “Cobbler, rag’n’bone man, fish monger, welder, builder, sweep, carpenter, window cleaner, butcher”, capped off by an inspirational “Be your best”, with yellow highlights that match the colour of the shipyard cranes Samson and Goliath (see the third image).

In being overshadowed by the mural, the “Let’s Twist Again” sculpture on the plaza in front of the business centre now becomes a symbol of east Belfast rather than the symbol. It too features east Belfast’s “industrial past” (BelTel), using rope as a metaphor for community: “By being bound together in a common cause, the natural tendency for each twist, fibre, yarn, and strand to separate, only serves to make the rope stronger.”

On the wall behind the sculpture and below the mural is one of the Eastside Lives Heritage Trail (pdf) figures, Jane Scott, whose fifteen-year-old son Samuel fell to his death from a ladder while working on the ship in 1910. She supposedly cursed the ship and it sank two years later. (See also Godfather Of Legal Betting and various others.)

For a straight-on shot, see the post at the Paddy Duffy collection.

Images of the completed piece are from March 27th and 29th. The in-progress image below is from March 18th.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14898 [X14897]
X14934 [X14935] [X14936] [X14937]
X14940 [X14939] [X14938]
X14900 X14901 X14899 X14902 X14903
X14894 [X14895] [X14896]

Under The Green Paint Tree

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

Here is a bonus post, thanks to our London correspondent, of the latest offering from Banksy, showing “foliage” added to the wall behind a pruned-back cherry tree (BBC) by a youth with a canister sprayer. The piece perhaps indicates a desire for more greenery in the area – Finsbury Park in north London; it has already been vandalised with white paint (Guardian).

The final image below is of a 2012 Banksy (Artlyst) that is still hanging on in Kentish town, of a girl with a large lollipop pulling a kiddie-wagon containing a rocket.

Previously on Extramural: Banksy-style art in Belfast and Bundoran.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Peter Moloney
X14911 X14910 X14912