Artist as Family: Under the sunshine of the day

Sunday, 1 February 2015

Under the sunshine of the day

We haven't stopped riding, of course. We rode several kms out of town to go and camp with our friends Fe and Ant and their little sproglets Luna and Fabrizio.

We walked across the road to join more friends for a BBQ and raid their vertical berry patch. Thanks Luke and Kate!

For Meg's birthday we rode out to her sister Kate's family farm for a delicious dinner of home-made pasta and babka birthday cake. The best!

We went to Melbourne to tell our story to national breakfast TV.

They wanted to know what challenges we faced and what it was like to eat roadkill.

Back at home we wanted to know what living in Japan was like post Fukushima. Yae Fujimoto, Rick Tanaka and Hiro Fujimoto gave us an insight into the reality of living with nuclear reactors. Thanks HRN for organising this event.

From our own region's non-radioactive orchards we collected more apples. Some for juice, some for stew, some for cider, some for drying and some more for the chooks.

We've also been busy preserving, dehydrating, brewing and fermenting various stores for winter.

Meg and Woody experimented with flaxseed crackers,

in the dehydrator. Pretty bloody good!

Zeph and Jasper got the old billycart back up and running,

before Zeph took himself off to religio-military school.

Wide lawns, narrow minds, as one Australian artist recently exhibited. Please keep hold of yourself Zeph, as you venture into this experiment with patriarchal institutionalisation.

Zeph spent his last weeks of home-education hanging out with friends, helping with the gardening, being a big brother and working on his bike.

Then it was time for our first Critical Mass ride for the year.

Followed by a small intimate gig at the Albert Street community garden with this guy,

and his partner Hayley Egan. We archived excerpts from the ride and the gig into this little vid:

We've also been pickling walnuts that we gleaned green from street and backyard trees,

and sowing companion plants, carrots and alliums, in a new raised bed made specifically for winter crops.

Whatever you're making, Dear Reader, we hope it is bringing you nourishment and fulfilment, that you're not working too hard and you have days in your week to lounge and muse and make love under the sunshine of the day.

4 comments:

Kate Moore2 February 2015 at 07:44
Studying, working, volunteering, planting, plucking, meeting and greeting. Yup. It's been a good week here too.
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Jude T2 February 2015 at 19:36
Baby number 2 arrives soon & we've gone a bit mad freezing, preserving, mulching (no one wants to spend hours watering on zero sleep). My little brother says we're beginning to resemble doomsday survivalists, but it seems to alleviate pre-birth anxiety !
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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’.