Artist as Family: A Small Group

Sunday, 18 December 2011

A Small Group

It has been over a year since all three of us were at the Food Forest. So much has happened in our home garden, we knew that in Sydney's semi-tropical weather, much change and growth would have come about. We were right! Everything was humming with the business of life, especially one of the nectarine trees. A year ago it was a quarter of the size!

We discovered many other surprises in the garden. The first was Amanda, who is part of the church and who has been keeping us in the loop about happenings in the garden.

There was also much abundance to be found (and eaten). Strawberries

and Dianella berries. The leaves were used to weave dillies and baskets by the Gadigal and the fruits were eaten as well as used as dye.

The first things we did was make this sign and get busy weeding.

When we initially installed the garden, we buried thick black plastic around the perimeter to prevent the tenacious couch grass from making itself at home. It was great to see that it worked.

It was also great to see the bales of sugarcane mulch and pine bark that the City of Sydney Community Gardens and Landcare Coordinator donated, which was quickly put to use.

It was great to see the water tank was full after the recent rains.

It was great to see evidence of people using the space as it was intended.

It was great to catch up with some old friends and meet some new ones.

It was great to stand back at the end of the weekend and admire what a small group of thoughtful, committed people are capable of achieving in a short amount of time.

It was great to look at all the trees and think, I knew you when you were this big!

And to feel like explorers in the garden of the world.

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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’.