Artist as Family: Carless and carefree in the country

Thursday, 13 January 2011

Carless and carefree in the country

We've been bike loony over the past several weeks, trading in our car for new cargo bikes and bringing them home on the train,

initiating Daylesford Critical Mass' participation in the town's NYE street parade,

and setting off for bike camps between 15 and 40km from home.

But the last few days we've been held up in the house, watching the rain in disbelief, thinking about the fauna and flora affected by the floods, the lives lost and displaced, the era ahead.

Ride safe wherever you are and if you drive a car please think bike.

2 comments:

Meg15 December 2015 at 11:05
Hi AaF, I just found your blog and have gone back to the beginning to read it all! I know this is an old, old entry, but I thought this was a timely place to drop a note.

I have been car-free for the vast majority of my adult life, relying instead on PT an my beloved bike. Earlier this year, I had a bub, and for the last seven months we have been using a friends car loaned to us while he was overseas.

In some ways, it has been a blessing, allowing me to visit family who live beyond PT while my bub has been too little to take on a bike. But I found myself relying on it more and more, and as the time draws near to return the car, my partner and I found ourselves discussing the purchase of a car.

But it didn't sit right with me, and as I read your blog, I was reminded of what is possible with a bike and PT, reminded to take it slow, invited to think again about the damage to the environment and society that a car makes, reminded how much I love biking and inspired to once again be car free, this time as family.

Later this week, we return the car to our friend. Early next year, we acquire a yuba mondo. I can't wait.

Thanks AaF for the reminder and the inspiration and the solidarity.
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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’.