Artist as Family: Preserving fruit, extending kin

Friday, 3 January 2014

Preserving fruit, extending kin

We made it to Moss Vale! 929 kms from our home in Daylesford, Victoria to the Southern Highlands of NSW, averaging a leisurely 24 kms per day.

We joined kin from far and wide to become artist as extended family for a lovely, warm but nonetheless strange little timezone between Christmas and New Year.

We caught up with some old friends and reunited with Zeph so that finally all our bike seats are full.

It feels good to have onboard again what Zeph brings to the gang.

We have yabbied and swam in the Wingecarribee River,

and foraged for wild cherry plums to turn into fruit leather.

Although not all reached the bag...

The ones brought home we squashed and mashed with our hands,

and then pushed the pulp through a sieve

leaving all the pips and skin.

We spread out the pulp over grease-proof paper on a large-sized pizza tray

and dried in a low oven for about 8 hours. Alternatively you can dry the paste in the sun over several days.

The result is a delicious, sweet and nutritious fruit leather which is preserved for many moons with no additives or added sugar.

From we five here, we wish you a happy and health-filled year ahead.

7 comments:

Chris B3 January 2014 at 14:45
I tried a similar recipe but with grapes! There was an overgrown vine at an abandoned house in newcastle with fruit falling to the ground. It was delicious!
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Artist as Family3 January 2014 at 21:17
awesome chris, so the grapes worked well? as you probably know, this method of preserving is also good for turning inedible hawthorn berries into edible-medicinal food.
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Anonymous4 January 2014 at 20:18
wonderful thanks, Ill try that with the loquats up here
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Unknown16 July 2014 at 06:20
I love how both topics are certainly correlated. Looks like the whole clan had tons of fun, with the meet up and all. I love cherry plum and I wonder how those leathers made from them taste like. Thank you for sharing this fun post. Great pictures, by the way. Cheers!

Faith Thomas @ The Berry Farm
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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’.