Artist as Family: Many Hands

Saturday, 10 July 2010

Many Hands

What a great day!

Thank you to everybody who came along to take part in the Food Forest Plant-In.

For those of you who couldn't make it, here's a snapshot of what went on.

Click for bigger

10 comments:

Will10 July 2010 at 23:34
hey patrick and family. i saw you on the news, and recognised the patch of ground from your blog which i had read. i noticed that they had your name on the screen as patrick white? i thought it was patrick jones...
anyway, what a rad thing to do, cheers.
will
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Belinda10 July 2010 at 23:59
brilliant work guys! looks amazing! wish i could have made it there today.. was busy workin' for the man.
can't wait to wander by soon (and later on when it gets all bushy and wild)!
belinda.
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kate11 July 2010 at 17:35
gorgeous & inspiring x
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Peter O'Mara11 July 2010 at 18:16
Holy Costas!

AAF goes absolutely viral.

As I type Lily walks past & turns my mouth into a smile. She is back in her paddle-pop pyjamas & Mindy sniffs her twinkled nose at our feet.

I smile now 1,2,3.

Patrick.Meg.Zephyr.

Remarkable!

xPete
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Damien Bodnarchuk B.Hlth Sc Tradtional Chinese Medicine11 July 2010 at 19:23
Awesome guys!
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WriterBee11 July 2010 at 19:32
Well earned congratulations are due to AAF.
Wish I could have been there to get my hands dirty with you in honour of this wonderful project.
I wish her bountiful success! xx
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Lucas11 July 2010 at 21:59
what a fun day that was! my favourite part was meeting francis, the church pastor. what a guy.

(it was a bit of a gamble, but in hte end, it certainly paid off, didn't it zephyr? he he.)
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Libby12 July 2010 at 09:02
Really great to meet you guys and thanks again for bringing beauty to our favourite neighbourhood.
Libby, Gabe and baby Jem xxx
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The Joneses12 July 2010 at 13:46
For me the most interesting bit was watching the people. Kept me hanging around like a bad smell for ages. We did a small blog on it with a couple of piccies.

http://abundense.blogspot.com/2010/07/will-real-joneses-please-stand-up.html

Wonderful stuff and great inspiration for our project down south.
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pearshaped13 July 2010 at 20:17
We loved popping by and planting! great work, we'll be back to see how it all goes. Thanks
Louise and Tilda
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About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.