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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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.

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."

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

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

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.

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

METAL RUST BRICK No.1

METAL RUST BRICK No.1 - Paul Conneally 2014

One of three appropriated metal, rust and brick sculptures on permanent exhibition from July 4th 2014 Loughborough University, UK.

Anne-Marie Culhane - Environmental Artist

Anne-Marie Culhane - Environmental Artist

Paul Conneally

Loughborough 2014

"I draw inspiration from the cycles of nature and seasons; permaculture (learning from natural systems); environmental and ecological concerns or questions and listening and responding to people, landscapes and particular sites (urban or rural). I am motivated to work with others to reduce the harm we are inflicting on our planet; to increase understanding our place in the family of things and to bring to life positive visions now and for the future."

Anne-Marie Culhane

Find out more about Anne-Marie and her work here: Anne-Marie Culhane

A DAY AND NIGHT OF MOTHS & MAPS Fruit Routes Events June 17 2014

Join us for a day and night of moths and maps on the 17th June 2014 at Loughborough University Fruit Routes.

EAT YOUR CAMPUS

EAT YOUR CAMPUS - Fruit Routes - The Second Planting

Two years on after the first trees were planted on the Fruit Route, an artist led project by Anne-Marie Culhane, across Loughborough University Campus, we planted more trees. 

The planting followed a workshop on pruning, cutting back to keep the previously planted trees  healthy and promote growth.

I wrote between digging and will publish what comes in due course, in the meantime here's the poem I wrote during the first wave of planting:

The Cut in Her Stomach

bare trees
the sound of spades 
across tarmac

we huddle
by a green tractor 
how to plant a tree

cold rain
it’s at least a two man job
a tree like this

the English undergrad
asks everyone
‘what's nepotism?’

a twinge
from the cut in her stomach 
she digs deep

no not cold
just wet
and getting heavier

the lost referee
asks for directions 
to the all weather pitch

hazel whips 
we find a seam 
of hard core

‘with the hedge’ 
he says 'plant three for one
just in case’

she’ll need
a stepladder now
to see the runners' legs

Paul Conneally
written on 18 Febr, 2012 the first day of planting the new Fruit Route at Loughborough University

'Solidarity' - Fruit Routes Loughborough University - The Second Planting

Student volunteers prepare to dig holes and plant more fruit trees on the Fruit Route at Loughborough University, UK.

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

Photograph: 'Spades' Paul Conneally, Loughborough, 2014

Topping Out 'Kiss the Gable' - Paul Conneally & Anne-Marie Culhane

TOPPING OUT – KISS THE GABLE – Paul Conneally and Anne-Marie Culhane 2013 Photo: Kev Ryan

Cultural Forager, artist and poet, Paul Conneally, anoints a garden Shed during Conneally and Culhane’s ‘Topping Out Kiss the Gable’ ritual performance piece at Loughborough University Fruit Routes Harvest Celebration.

The shed stands on the LANDSCAPING AND GARDENING SOCIETY plot at Loughborough University and was recently erected to replace the original shed which was burnt down earlier in the year.

‘TOPPING OUT Kiss the Gable’ is based on the ceremony of Topping Out that builders undertake when the highest point of a building is completed. In Conneally and Culhane’s version, switches of tree and other plants are bound together and placed at the apex of the shed. The hanging plant material includes rowan, holly and bay twigs to ward of bad spirits and bring good luck to the shed and all who use it.

Two ladders were placed against the gable and people at the Fruit Routes Harvest Celebration were invited to climb one ladder, kiss the apex of the gable and say a few words if they felt that they wanted to while at the same time being anointed by Conneally, who is up the other ladder, with Apple juice freshly pressed on site that afternoon.

After Topping Out and Kissing the Gable the gathered people moved to a bonfire where food, drink and conversation carried on into the night with music being provided by the band Solana.

Jumping for Joy - Fruit Routes - Conneally and Culhane June 2013

During 'In Your Hands',  the performative installation by artist activists Paul Conneally and Anne-Marie Culhane, we find Mika Obara jumping for joy for Japan in the nettle te leaves at the bottom of her tea bowl.

'In Your Hands' saw the public invited by Conneally and Culhane to join them for wild tea, scones, jam, clotted cream and tasseography, reading the te leaves, in one of the orchards planted as part of Culhane's long term piece for Loughborough University Sustainability Team, 'FRUIT ROUTES'.