A (Hit The North) Paint Jam was held on Saturday (the 25th) in Lower Garfield Street, organised by Seedhead Arts (ig) and the Belfast Improvement District (BID web). Shown below are Laura Nelson (ig), NRMN (ig), and Ollie Amscai (ig).
For images of all the completed works, see the entry at the Paddy Duffy Collection.
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“DUP backs united Ireland in coming border poll, Mon, 5th May”. This image updates one of the images from two weeks ago of the re-painted mural at Madden’s bar in the city centre – see Sásta A Bheıth Anseo. Initially the newspaper showed a headline relating to the prosecution of DUP (now-former) leader Jeffrey Donaldson on charges of rape and sexual assault.
The DUP in January flirted (strategically) with the idea of supporting a border poll (BBC) but their more typical stance is that the conditions for a poll are not close to being met (News Letter).
While elections sometimes fall on the 5th as the first Thursday in May – most recently the 2022 Assembly elections (CAIN) – the date here is probably a nod to the anniversary of Bobby Sands’s death (in 1981).
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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.
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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.
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“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
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This is one of Solus’s (ig | web) boxers in graceful poses, painted for HTN24 on Millfield at the bottom of Brown Street.
For close-ups, see the post at Paddy Duffy’s site.
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This painted box by Karl Fenz (web) is on Middlepath Street past the M3 and within sight of the Teenage Dreams.
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Spray-painted utility box in Iveagh Street, west Belfast.
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“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.
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Extramural Activity 