Fruit Routes Graphic - Anne-Marie Culhane

Fruit Routes - graphic from the Fruit Routes Recipes pamphlet by Anne-Marie Culhane

FRUIT ROUTES

I've been working on Fruit Routes since 2011 with artist and environmental activist and my long time collaborator Anne-Marie Culhane who conceived Fruit Routes and drives it forward.

So many other artists have joined us on Fruit Routes and contributed time and works, ideas and interventions and the Fruit Route now has a life of its own beginning to spider out from the Loughborough University Campus into and across Loughbohemia.

Paul Conneally
(Little Onion)

Balancing An Apple On Your Head Race - Loughborough University

Participants in the 'Balancing An Apple On Your Head Run' at the artist led Fruit Routes Apple Olympics at Loughborough University.

Fruit Routes was conceived by artist and environmental activist Anne-Marie Culhane.

Photograph: Paul Conneally - Loughborough - October 2017

The Loughborough University Fruit Routes Apple Olympics 2016

Participants in the artist led Fruit Route Apple Olympics at Loughborough University wear not numbers but the names of fruit tree varieties that are planted on the Loughborough Fruit Route and associated orchards across the university campus.

Events in the Apple Olympics included the '1km or so' run, apple not shot putting, balancing an apple on your head race and the egg and apple race.

Fruit Routes is an ongoing work conceived and led by artist and environmental activist Anne-Marie Culhane.

Photograph: Paul Conneally 2016

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Competitors In The Fruit Routes Balancing An Apple On Your Head Race2016

Competitors in the artist led Fruit Routes Apple Olympics balancing an apple on your head race. Each competitor wears not a number but the name of a fruit tree species planted during the Fruit Routes work on Loughbohemia (some call it Loughborough) University Campus.

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Other events were the '1km Or So Fruit Routes Run' where the aim was for all competitors to cross the finishing line together and not shot but 'apple putting' not forgetting of course the children's 'Apple And Spoon Race'.

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Fruit Routes is conceived and planned by my long time collaborator artist activist Anne-Marie Culhane with and for the wonderful Loughborough University Sustainability Team and it's a pleasure to work on and have be associated with it as artist and poet year on year since its start.

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Paul Conneally
Loughbohemia
October 2016
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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

Anne-Marie Culhane and Rama Gupta at Loughborough University Fruit Routes

Artist and environmental activist, Anne-Marie Culhane, pictured with environmentalist and Green Party pioneer, Rama Gupta, during the artist led walk around Loughborough University 'Fruit Route'

Fruit Routes is an ongoing artwork conceived by Culhane that involves planting fruit trees and bushes around the university campus along with other artistic and environmental interventions.

The project urges users of the University to 'EAT YOUR CAMPUS'

Photograph: Paul Conneally

October 2015

Paul Conneally

SKEP hive mind - Loughborough University Fruit Routes 2015

Artist Paul Conneally during SKEP Loughborough University June 2015

SKEP

hive mind

Performative, Participative, Collaborative Installation

Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally

Fruit Routes Loughborough University

18th June 2015

We share our lives with and our very existence depends on the bees - a keystone species in the natural world.

Building on the tradition of Telling the Bees, where beekeepers informed the bees of significant events in their communities or lives, you are invited to share something of your personal thoughts on community, cooperation and the future of our relationship with the ecological community (animals, insects, plants).

Speak out loud

Share your thoughts in silence

Write in the book

Artist Anne-Marie Culhane during SKEP Loughborough University June 2015

SKEP is part of the ongoing Fruit Routes / Eat Your Campus work at Loughborough University in June 2015. SKEP was one element in a day of events and interventions coordinated by Culhane that included a wild tea party, visits to the campus apiary and an evening of moth catching and watching. SKEP offered a space for thought and quiet in the presence of a listener, SKEP, Culhane or Conneally sat passively, silent, wearing a traditional British woven basket beehive, a skep, on their head.

SKEP Hive Mind - Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally

SKEP
hive mind

Performative, Participative, Collaborative Installation
Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally
Fruit Routes Loughborough University
Took place on: 18th June 2015

We share our lives with and our very existence depends on the bees - a keystone species in the natural world.

Building on the tradition of Telling the Bees, where beekeepers informed the bees of significant events in their communities or lives, people were invited to share something of their personal thoughts on community, cooperation and the future of our relationship with the ecological community (animals, insects, plants).

"Speak out loud

Share your thoughts in silence

Write in the book"

Culhane & Conneally 2015

Anne-Marie Culhane on Art as Collaboration

Click the above to listen to Anne-Marie Culhane in convervasion with Rob Hopkins talk about art as collaboration and her wider work.


Anne-Marie Culhane during Fruit Routes at Loughborough University Photo: Paul Conneally

Bees + Moths + Trees + People

Open and Shut
Artists Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally
Photograph: Christopher Mear

Now gearing up for Fruit Routes Summer 2015 'Bees + Moths + Trees + People' on Wednesday 17th June 2015 - it's free!

Walt Shaw - Gong Man

Walt Shaw - Gong Man

Walt Shaw, Gong Man, during our Loughborough University Fruit Routes Gong Workshop preparing to honour the new trees planted in the Barefoot Orchard on February 11th 2015 with a Gong Ceremony and performance.

Walt gave two inspirational workshops and it's only now after the event that I find we have a mutual connection in that we both had the privilege of working in the past with the late great Lol Coxhill.

Here's Walt with Mahood and Lol performing at the Lamp Tavern in Birmingham in 2006:

https://vimeo.com/94787452

I've got a feeling that fate has brought Walt and I together through Fruit Routes and that we will soon work together on future projects.

Paul Conneally
Loughborough University
February 2015

A Spade in the Barefoot Orchard

A Spade in the Barefoot Orchard

A spade used during the February planting of an additional 32 trees in the Fruit Routes Barefoot Orchard at Loughborough University. The planting was followed by a gong ceremony and performance, new type of wassail, to celebrate and bless the trees, the ground.

The planting and gong ceremony form part of artist and environmental activist Anne-Marie Culhane's ongoing work Fruit Routes supported by Loughborough University Sustainability Team through Jo Hasbury-Shields

Paul Conneally
Loughborough University Barefoot Orchard
February 2015

Apple Peel Poetry

Apple Peel Poetry Installation - Paul Conneally 2014

During artist activist Anne-Marie Culhane's Fruit Routes Harvest Celebration at Loughborough University, Conneally invites visitors to peel an apple, trying to create as long a single piece of peel as they can They then measure the peel in centimetres and find the page number equivalent to the length of peel in a book of collected Wordsworth poems. They count down the number of lines equal to the number of letters in their name, copy it out on a label replacing one word with the word apple and hang the peel and poem up across the gable end of a garden shed.

Loughborough University Fruit Route October 2014

Stonehouse Seedstore - Anne-Marie Culhane 2014

Stonehouse Seedstore created by Anne Marie Culhane in Stonehouse, Plymouth, UK.

‘Anne Marie has been working with residents from across the area to collect individual stories about our relationships to plants through growing and eating. The Seedstore also includes plants that are, or have been important in the story of Stonehouse, gathered through conversations with residents and historians. She has use these to create a seed store as a community resource, a connection to the natural world and a celebration of diversity in Stonehouse.’

The plan now is to keep the Store at Union Corner for people to see and read the stories, to go out to events, and for the swapping of seeds.

Artist Anne-Marie Culhane - Fruit Routes Harvest 2014

Artist Anne-Marie Culhane during her Fruit Routes Harvest Back to Back walk with fellow Simone Kenyon at Loughborough University.

Paul Conneally
Loughborough
October 2014

Barefoot Blindfold - Choreographed by Birdsong

The blind man's guide,
Meek and neglected thing, of no renown!
Soon will peep forth the primrose, ere it fades
Friends shall I have at dawn, blackbird and thrush
To rouse me, and a hundred warblers more!

from 'The Recluse' by William Wordsworth

Artist Paul Conneally during his and Anne-Marie Culhane's Barefoot Blindfold piece at 5am on Loughborough University Fruit Route.

Eleven were slow walked by Anne-Marie Culhane into an orchard section of her ongoing Fruit Route work at Loughborough University to take part in Culhane and Conneally's 'Barefoot Blindfold.

Participants chose a fruit tree sat against it and were blindfolded in order to foucus their senses away from the visual for the the first half hour and then still in slience to spend the next half hour without the bliindfold recording their emotions / reactions to the fruit route at dawn.

Conneally invited them during the blindfold session to allow the sounds to choreograph the movements of their upper body and arms. This is a short section filmed by Miriam Keye of Conneally being choreographed by nature in fact by birdsong.

This is only a small part of the whole of Barefoot Blinfold but offers perhaps opportunities to explore the idea of being choreographed by nature further in other works to come. Perhaps we already are.

Rite Of Passage

his rite of passage

a freezer full

of mother's fruit pies

Verse 3 from the Acorn Bank leg of our Full Bloom Renga.

The a Full Bloom Renga followed the blossom moving through England's orchards from The Mother Orchard at Cothele House in Cornwall to Acorn Bank in Cumbria over a period of three to four weeks.

Full Bloom renga was conceived by artist Anne-Marie Culhane with Paul Conneally, Alec Finlay and Jo Salter for The National Trust, 2010.

The Quick Way - Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally 2007

The Quick Way

A twelve verse Junicho renga in the season of Summer, 16 June 2007 
Barracks Lane Community Garden, Oxford - from the renga archive.

A black bucket
filled with redcurrants
making jelly the quick way

there are many reasons
to celebrate

the magistrate offers
a road safety course
instead of a fine

rail track closed
due to snow

my phone is full
of your messages
which one shall I erase?

on the horns of a dilemma
finding it difficult to rest

bent double
a pair of students seek mushrooms
lit by sunset

we bring my geraniums indoors
together

in the east end
a line of bulldozers
moves through an allotment

this is my home
I lie flat beneath a vast sky

by the light of the moon
a frog sings
in a puddle

rain drenches
buds and blossoms

Anne-Marie Culhane (master poet)
Paul Conneally (host poet)
Catherine Naysmith
Oonagh Desire
Jo Salter
Dave Jones
Jenny Stanton
Anita Joice
Joseph Conneally
Colin May
Becky Didlick
Gaby Hock

Wild Tea Party - Culhane and Conneally Loughborough Fruit Route 2014

Fruit Routes Wild Tea Party - Culhane and Conneally 2014

An ongoing element of my work with Anne-Marie Culhane is our Wild Tea Parties.

They involve collecting leaves and flowers from around the area where the party is to take place which are made into tea and served with cakes, scones and jam at the party itself.

The party becomes a talking shop where specific themes might be developed organically as locally foraged wild teas are drunk and cakes are eaten.

At some sites the wild tea party goers are static while in others, as at Fruit Routes, the tea drinkers change, some staying an hour or so, others leaving after a drink and a chat to replaced by curious folks drawn in as they are passing by.

Along with the tea and cake we usually introduce another element, tasseography (reading the tea leaves) or some other manual skill - here we made sugar ropes that would be used to attract moths at our moth viewing night later in the day or back at participants homes.

Each Wild Tea Party is planned specifically for the site (inside or out) and to encourage thought and talk around the commissioning group's current concerns and themes.

Involving participants in the collecting of the wild teas adds to the piece. The artists taking them for a guided foraging walk of the locality before the actual wild tea party.

Culhane and Conneally will consider all interesting suggestions and offers to host a Wild Tea Party you can contact us via Love and Barley by emailing:

loveandbarley@gmail.com

Paul Conneally

June 2014

Culhane and Conneally - Artists

Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally

Culhane and Conneally are artists that work independently of each other coming together to work collaboratively, often on elements of Culhane's longer term environmental works and projects, such as Fruit Routes, but also on other shorter commissioned stand alone pieces.

Anne-Marie and Paul are pictured here just after one of their artist led Wild Tea Parties, this one in the Barefoot Orchard on the Loughborough University Fruit Route. Find out more about Fruit Routes: FRUIT ROUTES

The image here is by Conneally from a photograph by British photographer Chris Mear taken on Conneally's iPhone.