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Wednesday, 21 November 2012
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Visible tracking
I've written before about my project Paths of Desire that started in 2004, a fascination with how people choose to move across a landscape and the trails that they leave. The idea resurfaces as a project every now and then, or perhaps never really leaves me.
When Anne-Marie Culhane asked me to lead a walk as part of her Back to Back series for the Fruit Routes project, the idea of Paths of Desire was strong. Anne-Marie had created a map of a route that leads to where a number of fruit trees and berried hedgerows can be found around the Loughborough campus, and this seemed like a path for those that desire the sweet tastes and juicy bounty. However, in response to the project, the original idea of Paths of Desire developed a new turn.
The notion behind the Back to Back series is that different artists and others (ecologists, historians, poets etc.) lead walks which respond to each others' walk, taking the walk before as a lead but also diverging away from it. The walk before mine was by artist/poet Paul Conneally and ecologist Ed Darby.
Paul and Ed had started thinking about the other users of the Fruit Routes, the fauna. Through their project they wanted to give the fauna a voice, by creating "Twoots", or non-digital Tweets - like using the format of Twitter, writing in only 140 characters, but writing it down and hanging it from a tree as a way of disseminating the words.
Taking this as a lead, I wondered about the paths of desire of the fauna. (This notion had been hanging in the air for a while - as I wrote in the February post Snow Tracks and Secret Lives) How different would they be to the paths laid down by humans, which generally form a straight line from point of origination (A) to point of destination(B)?
Certainly when I am foraging I begin to move through a landscape in a different way, zigzagging across pathways, scouring edges, looking over hedgerows. How were the birds, animals and insects moving around, foraging their way through nature's bounty? What lines do their paths make?
So I started to track creatures. I would watch a bird or animal from a distance, noting the movements that they made until they disappeared out of site, and then marking that movement on the ground with string. The movements began to suggest thought processes: birds seemed to always close a circle of movement, returning to where they started from; a magpie seemed to cover an area of ground from one side to another methodically to scour every bit of grass; a midge flew from left to right in a figure eight as it climbed into the air.
Paul thought the idea followed the non-digital idea too, he described my pictures of tracks as non-digital geopositioning, using string and cocktail sticks.
What I was discovering about the behaviour of creatures was fascinating to me, so for my Fruit Routes walk I decided to introduce the idea of tracking creatures to the group of walkers.
We had a great response, around 20 people turned up for the walk. I had made small tracking bags with lo-tech kit in them for tracking: string, pegs, a pencil and a label. I explained how to track things and sent them off in small teams to see what they could find.
The group fully embraced the idea and created patterns of string beautifully around the orchard. They tracked wasps, a bumble bee, a magpie (that they named Eduardo) and an ant.
By marking the movements of creatures, we made visible the patterns of
their tracks and revealed something about their nature that we couldn't
previously see.
Following on from this idea of moving differently, Anne-Marie then asked the groups to lead each other blindfolded through the trees.
I watched them as they wandered around, crisscrossing the path so that they could find things to touch and smell. Had we tracked the blindfold-walkers paths I think they would have been surprised how much ground they covered!
Eventually we all found our way back to the Fruit Routes shed to eat soup and drink apple juice freshly made in the press.
I loved the tracking day and I will have to do this again. Thanks very much to Anne-Marie for asking me to be a part of it.
When Anne-Marie Culhane asked me to lead a walk as part of her Back to Back series for the Fruit Routes project, the idea of Paths of Desire was strong. Anne-Marie had created a map of a route that leads to where a number of fruit trees and berried hedgerows can be found around the Loughborough campus, and this seemed like a path for those that desire the sweet tastes and juicy bounty. However, in response to the project, the original idea of Paths of Desire developed a new turn.
The notion behind the Back to Back series is that different artists and others (ecologists, historians, poets etc.) lead walks which respond to each others' walk, taking the walk before as a lead but also diverging away from it. The walk before mine was by artist/poet Paul Conneally and ecologist Ed Darby.
Paul and Ed had started thinking about the other users of the Fruit Routes, the fauna. Through their project they wanted to give the fauna a voice, by creating "Twoots", or non-digital Tweets - like using the format of Twitter, writing in only 140 characters, but writing it down and hanging it from a tree as a way of disseminating the words.
Taking this as a lead, I wondered about the paths of desire of the fauna. (This notion had been hanging in the air for a while - as I wrote in the February post Snow Tracks and Secret Lives) How different would they be to the paths laid down by humans, which generally form a straight line from point of origination (A) to point of destination(B)?
Certainly when I am foraging I begin to move through a landscape in a different way, zigzagging across pathways, scouring edges, looking over hedgerows. How were the birds, animals and insects moving around, foraging their way through nature's bounty? What lines do their paths make?
 | |
| The track of Eduardo the magpie |
Paul thought the idea followed the non-digital idea too, he described my pictures of tracks as non-digital geopositioning, using string and cocktail sticks.
What I was discovering about the behaviour of creatures was fascinating to me, so for my Fruit Routes walk I decided to introduce the idea of tracking creatures to the group of walkers.
We had a great response, around 20 people turned up for the walk. I had made small tracking bags with lo-tech kit in them for tracking: string, pegs, a pencil and a label. I explained how to track things and sent them off in small teams to see what they could find.
 |
| The path of a bumble bee |
 |
| An ant walking a leaf |
 |
| Wasps in flight |
Following on from this idea of moving differently, Anne-Marie then asked the groups to lead each other blindfolded through the trees.
I watched them as they wandered around, crisscrossing the path so that they could find things to touch and smell. Had we tracked the blindfold-walkers paths I think they would have been surprised how much ground they covered!
Eventually we all found our way back to the Fruit Routes shed to eat soup and drink apple juice freshly made in the press.
I loved the tracking day and I will have to do this again. Thanks very much to Anne-Marie for asking me to be a part of it.
Sunday, 4 November 2012
Slow Walking
It was great to spend some time with artist Anne-Marie Culhane last week, when I took part in the Fruit Routes project.
Anne-Marie is involved in many interesting projects and I was intrigued by her description of her practice as a slow walker. She has learned to walk incredibly slowly and feels this changes her perception of the environments through which she walks, altering her sense of time and the present moment and connecting with her internal self. This resonates with some of the thoughts I have had recently on walking as a meditational practice (I have been intending to write some blog posts on this idea, I promise I will do that soon!).
I found the link below to a project Anne-Marie completed in collaboration with Bob Levene, which further illuminates the slow walking practice. In The Blink of An Eye was recently shown at the National Media Museum in Bradford.
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
Anne-Marie is involved in many interesting projects and I was intrigued by her description of her practice as a slow walker. She has learned to walk incredibly slowly and feels this changes her perception of the environments through which she walks, altering her sense of time and the present moment and connecting with her internal self. This resonates with some of the thoughts I have had recently on walking as a meditational practice (I have been intending to write some blog posts on this idea, I promise I will do that soon!).
I found the link below to a project Anne-Marie completed in collaboration with Bob Levene, which further illuminates the slow walking practice. In The Blink of An Eye was recently shown at the National Media Museum in Bradford.
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
Eat Your Campus!
Join Fruit Routes and Landscape & Gardening Group for
Apple Pressing and Harvest Celebration
Friday 26th October
1pm-2pm: Back to Back lunchtime walk. Walk the new Fruit Route with ecologist Ed Darby & artist/poet Paul Connelly – meet at the Shed, Car Park 5, Loughborough University Campus
3.30pm: Apple pressing at the The Shed, Car Park 5. The community group Transition Town Loughborough will be on campus with its wooden apple press. Have a go at pressing apples we have collected on Campus and make fresh juice to take away or make into cider. Free hot soup!
Saturday 27th October
1pm-2pm: Back to Back Walk the new Fruit Route with artists Jo Dacombe & Anne-Marie Culhane – meet at the Shed, Car Park 5, Loughborough University Campus
2pm: Apple pressing, making a scarecrow, pumpkin carving, toffee apples, music etc.
4pm: Morris Dancing Workshop.
5pm: Ending the day with a Bonfire, BBQ, Live Music, Food, Apple Juice and Cider!
all at LAGS Garden, The Shed, Car Park 5
Loughborough University Campus
Seasonal Exchange: You may want to bring along something seasonal to the event – a poem, some fruit or veg, chutney, jam, cake or anything you wish to share.
to find out more:
fruitroutes blog
@fruitroutes
contact: mail@amculhane.co.uk
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Touching stone
In 2009-10 I took part in a wonderful project by Charles Monkhouse called Companion Stones.
I worked with 2 poets to create stones that would be placed in the Peak District, as a companion to the existing guide stoops that have been located there for 300 years. This made part of a network of 12 new stones created by artists and poets.
Charles recently sent me this photograph of one of the stones, that I created with poet John Sewell.
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When the stone was first made, it was a beautiful, clean, pale pink limestone that slightly glittered when the sun hit it. However, the paleness of the stone, though lovely, meant it was hard to read the words that John had written due to the lack of contrast. We were interested to see how it would weather.
Two years on, the stone has become embellished with colours; the action of running water has allowed moss or lichen of various greens to grow over its surface, not touching the sides though, they remain the original pink. It has begun to embed itself into the landscape in the way that stone will, as the original guide stoop (located just opposite across the road) has done.
What I absolutely love about this photograph is the evidence of hands rubbing away the green in order to read the words. The words are carved across a spiralling line that works its way into the stone, forming a slight dish in the stone that draws you into the centre. This idea was to echo John's words, "go inward". It seems that people have been drawn into the stone and rubbed at it to reveal the beautiful words, which are now more readable as they have been filled by the green.
Rock climbing is something I do and I love the touch of hand upon rock, the coolness and the sense of timeless solidity of ancient stone. I have climbed a number or gritstone and limestone climbs in the Peak District, each of which are listed in guidebooks with dates of the first time they were climbed, some back to the 1800s. Climbers over the centuries repeat these same climbs, hands touching the same part of rock, making a connection with long gone climbers through the eternity of the stone.
Our Companion Stone also entices numerous hands to touch it, rub at the words, and be drawn inwards into John's beautiful poem. A connection with others, a companion stone.
You can read John's wonderful explanation of his thoughts when he wrote this poem, where to find (and touch) the stones and about all the other Companion Stones, by clicking here.
I worked with 2 poets to create stones that would be placed in the Peak District, as a companion to the existing guide stoops that have been located there for 300 years. This made part of a network of 12 new stones created by artists and poets.
Charles recently sent me this photograph of one of the stones, that I created with poet John Sewell.
.jpg)
When the stone was first made, it was a beautiful, clean, pale pink limestone that slightly glittered when the sun hit it. However, the paleness of the stone, though lovely, meant it was hard to read the words that John had written due to the lack of contrast. We were interested to see how it would weather.
Two years on, the stone has become embellished with colours; the action of running water has allowed moss or lichen of various greens to grow over its surface, not touching the sides though, they remain the original pink. It has begun to embed itself into the landscape in the way that stone will, as the original guide stoop (located just opposite across the road) has done.
What I absolutely love about this photograph is the evidence of hands rubbing away the green in order to read the words. The words are carved across a spiralling line that works its way into the stone, forming a slight dish in the stone that draws you into the centre. This idea was to echo John's words, "go inward". It seems that people have been drawn into the stone and rubbed at it to reveal the beautiful words, which are now more readable as they have been filled by the green.
Rock climbing is something I do and I love the touch of hand upon rock, the coolness and the sense of timeless solidity of ancient stone. I have climbed a number or gritstone and limestone climbs in the Peak District, each of which are listed in guidebooks with dates of the first time they were climbed, some back to the 1800s. Climbers over the centuries repeat these same climbs, hands touching the same part of rock, making a connection with long gone climbers through the eternity of the stone.
Our Companion Stone also entices numerous hands to touch it, rub at the words, and be drawn inwards into John's beautiful poem. A connection with others, a companion stone.
You can read John's wonderful explanation of his thoughts when he wrote this poem, where to find (and touch) the stones and about all the other Companion Stones, by clicking here.
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Starting at the Green Patch
I start my residency at the Green Patch community allotments in Kettering on Monday.
It's a beautiful site. Artist Carole Miles and I will be working in the summer house which we put up on Friday. Nestled into a corner of what is the newly planted orchard, our new base already looks quite at home!
It couldn't have come at a better time. Both Carole and I had to move out of our studios in Corby this month, where we have been for 6 years. We could have felt a little lost after all the disruption that has caused. The studios have been a mixed blessing for over that time: a fantastic large space each in our own building with twenty four hour access, yet the building has gradually been deteriorating and the owners have given it little attention, and eventually started to use the central room as a storage area, which was beginning to make us feel unwelcome. Being there has also resulted in Carole and I nurturing our collaborative practice, which could have come adrift once we no longer had a shared building.
So when, only a week after we finally vacated the last items from our old studio spaces, we moved into our collaborative residency at the Green Patch, the move felt positive rather than a wrench. We both feel really excited about this project and the people at the Green Patch seem excited too, making us feel very welcome to invade their space!
We will be working fairly intensely at the allotments for the first two weeks, welcoming local people to come and join us in creating things as well as making our own work inspired by the site. The intention is to create work for the site itself, and for the summer house, which will remain there after we have gone. We will stay in residence for a while longer, into September, and hope to have a celebratory event to finish.
What we will make is very open at this point. We want our work to be in response to the site itself and let it direct our work, so we didn't want to have any preconceived ideas. It will be interesting to see how things unfold; Carole and I are quite different as artists, but we have crossovers of interests and we seem to work well together, so who knows what this three-way collaboration will result in - three ways being me, Carole and the Green Patch itself!
We will be blogging regularly on our collaborative project blog at undiscoverednetworks.blogspot.com so please visit us there.
It's a beautiful site. Artist Carole Miles and I will be working in the summer house which we put up on Friday. Nestled into a corner of what is the newly planted orchard, our new base already looks quite at home!
So when, only a week after we finally vacated the last items from our old studio spaces, we moved into our collaborative residency at the Green Patch, the move felt positive rather than a wrench. We both feel really excited about this project and the people at the Green Patch seem excited too, making us feel very welcome to invade their space!
We will be working fairly intensely at the allotments for the first two weeks, welcoming local people to come and join us in creating things as well as making our own work inspired by the site. The intention is to create work for the site itself, and for the summer house, which will remain there after we have gone. We will stay in residence for a while longer, into September, and hope to have a celebratory event to finish.
What we will make is very open at this point. We want our work to be in response to the site itself and let it direct our work, so we didn't want to have any preconceived ideas. It will be interesting to see how things unfold; Carole and I are quite different as artists, but we have crossovers of interests and we seem to work well together, so who knows what this three-way collaboration will result in - three ways being me, Carole and the Green Patch itself!
We will be blogging regularly on our collaborative project blog at undiscoverednetworks.blogspot.com so please visit us there.
Thursday, 19 July 2012
Seeking Unknown Land
I have written a guest blog post for Beauty & Utility Arts, click here to read it:
Seeking Unknown Land in Hinckley
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