Fruits From the Garden and Field

Artists David Burns and Austin Young, known collectively as Fallen Fruit, make public art that explores the role of fruit in creating shared culture. For the Food exhibition at the V&A, we worked with them to produce a piece responding to the little-known fact that the land on which the museum stands was formerly a nursery that supplied fruit trees to gardens around the country.  The resulting wallpaper teeming with images of fruit and insects gleaned from the V&A prints collection invited visitors to reflect on fruit as a cultural object and on the museum’s collections as a form of abundance.

For the second part of the commission they plotted the location of fruit trees growing in or overhanging public spaces in four London neighbourhoods from which communities can harvest fruit for free. These maps were a new iteration of  ‘The Endless Orchard’, Fallen Fruit’s global public artwork that encourages people to interact with their cities, and each other, in new ways.

Together the pattern and the maps issued a joyful call to re-imagine the city, its public spaces and institutions as generous and productive communal spaces where culture and agriculture might combine.