The Artist as Family

A Small Group

2011-12-18T19:25:00.002+11:00

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.

Food Forest Bee

2011-12-04T07:08:00.001+11:00

Hello Sydneysiders! We hope to see you soon.

We are heading your way for a two-day working bee at the Food Forest on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 December.

The bee will involve some general maintenance, composting techniques, water conserving strategies and planting sessions.

Local residents, church goers, Artist as Family groupies and Food Forest friends are all invited to attend this free event. Come for as long or short as you'd like between 10am - 4pm on both days.

BYO seeds, seedlings, garden tools, friends and picnics.

The Food Forest is located at St Michael’s Anglican Church, (Cnr Albion and Flinders), Surry Hills.

We hope to see you there!

Creative Commons: Water Commons

2011-11-24T12:18:00.001+11:00

Patrick has drawn a new map to show our findings. If Melbourne is serious about being zero-carbon then bottled water (and anything disposable) has to rapidly become an outmoded commodity.

Please feel free to distribute this map widely (copyright is just another form of privatisation).

Thanks to Designscope for scanning.

Key Audit Findings

2011-11-23T00:58:00.000+11:00

We found our first bubbler of the day near the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer streets at 8.35am.

We found that to make sure we didn't miss any of the bubblers in the chaos of the city we had to slow right down.

We found the entire contents of somebody's home out in the street. What a lucky country we live in that so much waste goes unwanted.

We found our friend Brett who joined us on our audit. We found him at the lovely Kinfolk café, which is staffed by volunteers and whose profits go to a selection of different charities.

We found that although we only drink rain water at home, we loved drinking a toast to all the working bubblers we came across.

We found that after a while we even started acting like water bubblers.

We found that we started seeing bubblers even when there weren't any.

We found a few over-zealous bubblers.

We found lots of important reasons to carry out our audit.

We found wheelchair accessible bubblers,

dog accessible bubblers

and bee accessible bubblers.

We found the wasteful remains of the winning entry in the 2011 Melbourne Urban Prize for sculpture.

We found bubblers being repaired.

We found bubblers from great heights.

We found some very brave people at the Occupy Melbourne protest; people willing to stand up to the corporate greed that is killing our planet.

We found some great examples of people growing their own food.

We found people will go to great lengths to get a drink of water.

Overall what we found was very positive compared with Patrick's findings from four years ago.

We found 46 bubblers in the CBD region, 19 more than last time.

We found 39 working bubblers, 21 more than last time.

When we enquired at the City of Melbourne council offices we were told that on average there are 788,000 people who use the city every day, 77,400 more than last time.

We found 1 working bubbler per 20,205 people whereas last time it was 1 working bubbler per 40,000 people.

Congratulations are in order for the City of Melbourne. It's fantastic to see that they have started to take the issue of bottled water pollution seriously. We encourage them to continue their great work by providing even more water bubblers for the people of Melbourne who are concerned about drinking just and free water.

And lastly we found that walking over 15km auditing Melbourne's bubblers sure did make us sleepy.

Water Bubbler Audit

2011-11-18T15:00:00.004+11:00

Four years ago, Patrick spent a day walking through Melbourne auditing the drinking water fountains in the CBD. His walk revealed that there was one working bubbler per 40,000 people in the city. He charted his findings on a map which he made freely available:

This coming Monday the 21st November, Artist as Family will spend the day retracing Patrick's walk through the CBD as we re-audit the city’s bubblers. We want to find out if the City of Melbourne is still committed to encouraging bottled water pollution or whether they’ve begun to transition to a sustainable and just free water supply by repairing all the broken bubblers and installing new ones for thirsty summer city dwellers.

Did you know that for Australians to drink bottled water, over 500,000 barrels of oil are required every year??

If you live in Melbourne, please feel free to join us for any part of our walk. We will have a mobile with us, so please call or text to lend us support or to find out our whereabouts: 0418 523 308.

Stay tuned for the findings of our audit.

Tip Trip

2011-09-18T20:42:00.005+10:00

It's been nine months since we sold our car and we have loved every minute of it. Yes—even walking in the pouring rain in winter. We agree with British adventurer Ranulph Fiennes who said "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."

But there is much to be said for walking in the sunshine, and today we said it as we walked to our local tip. We wanted to get rid of some unwanted goods, and have a fossick to see if there was anything we had use for at home.

We fossicked high and we fossicked low. And we fossicked around and around the Earth Ship demonstration wall we built earlier in the year with waste warrior Michael Reynolds.

We test rode all the bikes,

we sniffed out hidden treasures

including 30 metres of tangled chicken wire we are going to use to keep our five hens and one rooster out of a new garden bed.

We spent the better part of an hour pulling it this way and that until

it was ready to roll up and

roll all the way home.

Work Experience

2011-06-19T17:20:00.005+10:00

Liam wanted to see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what constitutes 'work', according to us. Here's a short vid that snapshots our social warming adventures.

This is Liam

2011-06-16T21:14:00.007+10:00

Liam goes to the local secondary college and this week is doing work experience with Artist as Family. Liam lives around the corner and every day this week has arrived on his bike at 9am with a bag of wild apples picked by his mum, ready to start the day.

Rather than just relegating Liam to spend time in a studio as he might have done with other practising artists, we have been out and about this week showing him how we live and make our art of the everyday.

As we live car free, riding and looking after our bikes is a big part of what we do

as is promoting bike culture in our town, and the monthly local Critical Mass ride.

Because we don't shop in supermarkets, thinking and talking about what we eat is also a big part of what we do. What we put in our bodies fuels the art we make, so if we want to make environmentally and socially responsible work, the food we eat needs to represent this. Every Wednesday we shop at our local organic bulk food table. This week we bought olive oil, almonds, tahini and 2kg of fresh juicy feijoas.

We made pasta.

We planted garlic before the full moon.

We measured up a potential site for a community food garden and drew up a draft plan of it to present to our local council.

We made music

and most importantly, we made a great new friend.

Food Forest ten months on

2011-05-25T07:56:00.002+10:00

Any available land

2011-03-02T10:52:00.007+11:00

We recently co-conspired with other community members to create another public food garden. Here's a short video we made to document this unauthorised direct action.

We've set up a Facebook page for the garden here.

Garden Bed Intruder

2011-01-15T07:39:00.006+11:00

Last year, this news item broke which provoked this musical interpretation of it, which in turn provoked us to make this:

Carless and carefree in the country

2011-01-13T12:34:00.012+11:00

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.

Creative commons, foraging commons

2010-11-16T21:38:00.009+11:00

If you like our Food Forest rock operetta you can download it for free at myspace, or at triple j unearthed.

We made this music to accompany our Food Forest film, which documents our week of planting.

The show closes, the forest grows on

2010-10-31T08:56:00.013+11:00

In the balance: Art for a changing world ends today. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have been participants in this show.

Thank you to the MCA staff, especially Anna Davis, and thank you to Francis Chalwell and the St Michael's community. Thank you to the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, and the Keir Foundation. And thank you to everyone who supported and assisted the development of this work, especially the Surry Hills community. We hope it will bring much pleasure and social warming for years to come.

Food forest is a free food commons. We only ask that it be a shared resource and that people, when they can, bring food to the soil (compost) in exchange for its bounties.

Thank you Hen for the photographs, for we Victorians it's so exciting to see such abundant growth.

Food Forest: A Very Public Resource

2010-10-06T11:06:00.019+11:00

Perhaps we're clutching at One-Straw Revolutions, but an interesting thing happened recently that we thought was worth sharing. Sydney Morning Herald writer Rachel Olding emailed us to ask whether they could use the Food Forest as a site to photograph a local chef foraging for his slow food restaurant for a story she was writing. We politely declined:

Dear Rachel,

Thank you for your email.

If Jared were cooking the food for a community event, then yes absolutely, we would be thrilled for him to be photographed in the Food Forest.

As we're sure you can appreciate, the principles of the Food Forest are to promote public, uncapitalised food. The Forest supplies local residents who might not be able to afford organic food, and the church's weekly soup kitchen.

We applaud the ethics of The Danks Street Depot, and what Jarred and Melanie are championing, but it still comes down to the Forest being a public resource, that celebrates the free transaction over anything monetary and exclusive.

Best of luck with the shoot, and apologies we were not able to be of help in this instance.

Meg, Patrick and Zephyr — The Artist as Family

Olding's article is great in terms of promoting the relocalisation of food resources and providing creative ways for getting off a heavily polluting agriculture grid (that's responsible for around 40-50% greenhouse gas emissions and wholesale deforestation). In this way the Waterloo chef's ideals and ours are similar. But it's the privatisation of public food resources we object to.

What Olding's article doesn't raise is the problems of privatisation, ecologically and socially, or how this chef's activity is akin to business taking content from blogs licensed under creative commons and capitalising on the material. Why should a restaurant owner take food from a community garden or public commons (ie foraging for edible weeds in Centennial Park) and then put a price on it?

Jared Ingersoll at the James Street community garden in Redfern.

Photo: Jon Reid, courtesy Sydney Morning Herald

Growth!

2010-09-23T21:03:00.005+10:00

September 2010

August 2010

June 2010

The Forest Floor

2010-09-20T22:35:00.010+10:00

Patrick is in Sydney and visited the Food Forest with family friend Josh Bowes, who generously helped with the initial planting back in July. They found fungi, edible weeds, an abundance of leaf vegetables, thriving fruit and nut trees, and evidence of dynamic social engagement.

A mushroom (perhaps don't eat) and some onion weeds (use as chives in a salad) spontaneously inhabit the forest floor, while rhubarb has been harvested to be used as an organic spray.

All these things show that humans and nonhumans are participating in this garden autonomously, and as a result this little food forest system (based upon permaculture principals) really appears to be working. Residents are bringing in their compost, harvesting plants and herbs to eat, while some are using plants to make organic sprays to allay pests. The woody mulch has, with spring warmth and rain, created humidity in the soil that fungi adores. Fungi in a forest floor is a great sign of soil health and, as gardeners will know, if the soil is healthy plants are less prone to pests. Growing plants in a polyculture using companion planting methods also assists the garden's health and allays pests and disease.

Relocalised food makes news

2010-09-02T14:20:00.017+10:00

Among sex scandals and sociopathic world leaders, Artist as Family's Meg holds ground as Food Forest makes page 3 of yesterday's SMH.

Click for bigger.

Read article here.

Bloomin' inspiring

2010-08-22T07:29:00.009+10:00

Vote 1 Peter Cundall!

We got to spend much of the day yesterday with one of the most generous and knowledgeable sustainability gurus. We learned so much about plants and soil, garden pests and wildlife, and how an 84 year old man has lived on organic food for fifty years, has a clean bill of health, and in this time has never taken any pharmaceutical medicines.

He inspired and delighted us, but one thing he said really stood out:

"Show children how to create: the best way to do this is to show them how to grow something. Children who know how to create things never grow into adults who destroy things."

Click for bigger

Sprung

2010-08-19T19:34:00.004+10:00

If you were anywhere near the top end of Albion Street, Surry Hills yesterday and you heard a high-pitched squeal, it was us! It was our first visit to the Food Forest since the Plant-In five weeks ago.

In the town we live in, in Victoria, we are still in the grips of winter: rain, frost, sleet, snow.

But here in Sydney, spring has sprung, the proof of which we saw in the Forest.

Food Forest is going to be officially opened on Saturday 21 August at 2.30pm, with a ~~floor~~ forest talk by the Artist as Family and gardening guru, Peter Cundall. Hope to see you there.

Ten days

2010-07-30T22:54:00.010+10:00

Here's our five minute doco of the Food Forest install, accompanied by our home-brewed rock operetta. Enjoy!

Why we do what we do

2010-07-27T21:44:00.017+10:00

1. Vandana Shiva

2. No matter how a person tries to frame or revise our culture there's no getting away from it – wealth delivers pollution.

3. Researchers tell us that the level of happiness peaks just above the poverty line, but we already knew this. Any accumulation of wealth after this point disables the adequate distribution of resources in order for local populations and ecologies to self-renew.

4. 32,000 people were treated last year in Australian hospitals for self-harming. The mental health of the country is flailing. An increasingly toxic food supply system is in part responsible. For a culture whose dominant ideology is based on a growth profit-pollution paradigm, figures like this will only increase.

5. The social and ecological costs of liberal growth economics should now be accounted. The world's elite impoverish life for everyone, especially the world's poor. An elite few are currently privatising the atmosphere to create the world's biggest commodity market – capitalising on pollution. This is sold as a solution – emissions trading and offsetting schemes – just as the Green Revolution was sold as a solution – privatised seeds and chemicals – for world hunger.

6. With ecological economics, community sovereignty of food, water and energy resources, and with permaculture principals you don't have to wait around for outmoded governments to reenter the real world; to understand soil microbes; to understand a just and sane way; to understand the profit-pollution paradigm; to understand the relationship between biodiversity and collective social health.

Key (draft)

2010-07-15T16:54:00.012+10:00

Click for bigger

Additional food planted on the first community plant-in day (the following plants relate to the areas on the drawing that we've labelled annuals and/or herbs):

Annuals – a variety of brassicas, peas, nasturtiums and marigolds.

Perennials – native parsnip, lemon verbena, lemon grass, lavender, rosemary, pigface, dianella, rhubarb, thyme, mint, comphrey, whiteroot, Vietnamese mint and strawberries.

We would love to make this map of the food forest more interactive and web accessible. Any budding web designers out there interested in helping us?

Reported

2010-07-14T10:41:00.006+10:00

A big thanks to our national public broadcaster for their coverage of our project last Saturday night, 10 July. Our nephew/cousin Freddy and Iona, a Surry Hills resident whose mum coincidently lives in Daylesford, are featured beside the newsreader, Deborah Rice.

Food Forest on ABC TV from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

There are a few mistakes in this reportage, namely the exclusion of the entire Artist as Family (Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones and Zephyr Ogden Jones); they spoke to Patrick and labelled him "Patrick White, Garden Artist"; and the church grounds where the forest is planted is St Michael's not St Stephen's, as reported.

Postpartum

2010-07-11T19:00:00.005+10:00

One of the reasons we were attracted to St Michael's church as a site for the Food Forest is because they run a soup kitchen every Sunday morning. One of the aims for the Forest is that it will eventually supply organic fruit and vegetables to the kitchen.

We visited the kitchen this morning and shared a meal with the local residents who are all very excited about their community's new asset. This is the hall after we helped pack up, before we headed next door to the garden.

We still had a few more things to do such as finish off mulching and say goodbye to our microbial friends in the soil, who it's been a privilege getting to know.

We then hammered stakes around the Forest's circumference and secured the bunting, which we won't remove until late August when the MCA show opens.

We then went round and drew a mud map of exactly what plants are where, which we will have engraved on a plaque to be displayed in the grounds, and available here online.

We then dilly dallied. We took some more photos. We chatted to a few more passing residents about their hopes for the work. We sat down. We stood up. We chatted to the church congregation as they left their Sunday service.

And then it was time to go.

Thank you so much to everyone who helped in making this work come about.

And thank you to those whose enthusiasm and stewardship will ensure its future abundance.

Many Hands

2010-07-10T21:10:00.005+10:00

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

Plant-In Preparation

2010-07-09T20:46:00.008+10:00

We planted ten bare rooted fruit and nut trees today, including fig, mulberry, apricot, peach, nectarine, plum and almond.

The ground was extra soft because of all the rain we have had, making the holes easy to dig.

This is Richard and Heidi. We only found this ground at all because of Heidi. When we had the idea to plant a Food Forest, we had great difficulty finding some land. Heidi, a local resident heard we were looking and suggested we approach St Michael's. The rest, as they say, is history. In the making. Thank you, Heidi!

After saying goodbye to Heidi and Richard we spent a few hours mulching the Forest floor, leaving a meter around the periphery bare so people know where to settle their plants during tomorrow's Plant-In.

Just before lunch we went out to the Marrickville Community Nursery and picked up some Pigface, Whiteroot, Coastal Rosemary and native parsnip, which we are going to plant tomorrow in the Forest's outer ring.

So people can identify what's what, we then wrote each plant's name on a small copper tag and hung it on the corresponding tree.

It's rained nearly every day we have worked on the Forest. But this afternoon's downpour was too heavy to work in, even for us Victorians. So it was tools down, and bottoms up at a hotel around the corner.

We will be on site tomorrow from 10am to 4pm come rain or shine. Come one and come all!

Companions for a Polyculture

2010-07-08T19:02:00.020+10:00

We had an organisational day today, so we were a little drier than we were yesterday. People have been contacting us to ask what plants would be best to bring on Saturday to the community plant-in. So if you too are wondering, here are a few suggestions:

Herbs such as basil (attracts butterflies), chervil, fennel, oregano, spearmint, dill and coriander (all repel aphids), sage, borage and hyssop (all attract honeybees), caraway (helps strawberries and attracts parasitic wasps), thyme, wormwood.

Flowers such as yarrow and tansy (both attract beneficial predators such as ladybugs and beetles), nasturtiums and marigolds (general all-rounders for attracting predatory insects).

Strawberries, rhubarb, Chilean guava and anything else that will grow in a semi-shaded position on the south-side of the garden. We are also requiring a few small hollow logs for lizards to inhabit.

As you can see below, the two internal zones (citrus, Cadigal and guava middle) and the upper canopy (large deciduous for winter light) are nearly complete, while the outer zone, the green pharmacy, will constitute the community 'plant-in' area.

The Forest for the Trees

2010-07-07T19:25:00.005+10:00

There was much activity on the corner of Albion and Flinders Streets today. Apart from all the rain and cloud action, we had trees and visitors aplenty.

Yesterday it seemed like an achievement to get two trees in the ground, today we planted considerably more, albeit somewhat smaller.

Here is one very special gardener with a very special delivery: olives, lemon verbena, rosemary, riberry and pecan.

And dianella and lomandra longifolia, the latter whose leaves contain a fibre that can be used in basket-making, weaving and to make string. Their flowers can be eaten raw, or dried and ground to make a flour for dense cakes.

We also planted a variety of citrus: grapefruit, mandarin, lime, lemon, orange and kumquat.

We also planted feijoas, coastal rosemary, lilly pilly, Brazilian guava, Hawaiian guava, avocados, lemon grass, loquat and cherimoya, which Mark Twain described as, "the most delicious fruit known."

With all the rain and planting the ground was getting pretty muddy, so we barrowed some mulch to make a path.

Then we cut down some trees and whittled them into stakes. Ha ha, not likely, although maybe one day the Forest will be abundant enough.

We fastened some hessian tree-tie to them, to support and guard each plant.

Just as the rain cleared, St Michael's Rev Francis Chalwell (right) came to say hello and introduce Bishop Alan Stewart.

And then a little later, Greens Senator, Scott Ludlam, Sustainable Cities portfolio, (right) and Tony Hickey, Greens candidate for the Federal seat of Sydney, (middle), came to see the Forest.

Dignitaries abounded, but the really very special guest was a visit by a beautiful native minor bird who danced around the oranges and had us entranced.

As well as updating this blog with the Forest activity, we have been documenting the progress on digital film, which we will edit into a short piece a little later on. Watch this space.

The First Trees

2010-07-06T18:16:00.011+10:00

We had another early start today. It was cold, so we all hooked in to the task of weeding, breaking up the clay, and preparing the ground for the first trees to be planted.

This is our friend Josh, who travelled up to Sydney to work with us on the Forest. Not only are you a gun with a shovel, Josh, but you're a great person to be around.

This project may be credited to the Artist as Family, but there's no way we could do this without the help we have received from people such as Josh, Anna at the MCA, Rachel, whose lodgings we crash out in each night, our friends back home who have been ringing and emailing their support, and people we meet on a daily basis such as Owen.

This is Owen. Our two main trees arrived on the back of his truck this morning.

Here comes the Spanish Chestnut. At 5 meters in height, she makes a very grand entrance and is carefully steered into her place at the head of the Forest.

Next up comes the Indian Horse Chestnut, generously donated by Michael Pfhal at Treekeepers Nursery, Bowral, NSW, who also grew the Spanish.

In an attempt to prevent the untiring couch grass from taking over the forest floor, we have weeded out every last skerrick of root and leaf, and today, laid black plastic in a trench around the periphery of the Forest as a barrier.

The couch grass may be indefatigable, but we mere mortals are not.

Sleep well chestnuts! See you on site in the morning.

That Ancient Ceremony

2010-07-05T19:37:00.006+10:00

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.
- Margaret Atwood

Today we lived our homage to Ms Atwood. We lived it in the rain. With two pairs of socks beneath our gum boots. We lived it in the rain as we intimately weeded the Food Forest floor, alongside magpies foraging for worms.

We lived it in the rain with our garden forks as we removed rocks and broken bricks and small tiles. And then we lived it with our shovels in hand as we mixed into the earth topsoil, compost and dynamic lifter, readying it for the trees that arrive tomorrow.

Roaming

2010-07-04T19:16:00.001+10:00

We have a big week of planting ahead of us, so we decided to take the weekend off to roam.

Even though it wasn't on our agenda, each day we started off at St Michael's to check that everything was as we left it.

The wind was chilly, but the sun was out. Perfect weather for drifting.

Good night. See you on site tomorrow.

Tools Up

2010-07-02T21:06:00.002+10:00

We got up early today. The bobcat was due at 7am and we wanted to edge the Forest before it arrived.

Our OH&S officer was standing by.

And then it arrived!

And got to work right away.

So we found other things to inspect.

Such as our first shipment of trees to arrive. Want to know what they are? Come back next week and we'll show you, when we make them feel at home in the soil.

But we can show you what arrived next: 4 cubic meters of steaming fresh compost mulch and 10 cubic meters of top soil. Now that was a satisfying dump..

Before adding these arrivals to the mix, we still need to weed and remove all the debris we find, such as the buried treasure we uncovered this afternoon.

But by far, the best arrivals of the day, are the passers by who stop to ask what we're doing, and the friends who drop by to say g'day.

And the most satisfying aspect of the day? Seeing the shape of things to come.

Day One: Forming the Forest

2010-07-01T20:23:00.007+10:00

It might have taken us a whole day to get from home to Sydney, but once we arrived on site it didn't take us long to:

Contemplate the space,

hammer in the stakes,

have a look around,

catch up with old friends,

lay out the hose to get the shape right,

do some painting

and

decorating.

Then we stood back and contempled the space again, that won't look like this for much longer.

Cross-community purposes

2010-06-28T21:50:00.011+10:00

Back in April, when we were desperate to find a home for the Food Forest, CarriageWorks tried really hard to accommodate us; we just couldn't find enough raw dirt to work with for our particular project. But while visiting CarriageWorks we got to see what the community was able to grow in terms of food, high up in the air, and it was pretty damn exciting. There are peeps all over the world growing food on balconies, rooftops and in sunlit living rooms. Projects like the CarriageWorks Kitchen Garden show us that you don't necessarily need a plot of land to relocalise your food supply.

Find out more here.

Here comes everybody

2010-06-24T20:04:00.007+10:00

Augmenting the spirit of our forthcoming Plant-in Day:

Alexandria permablitz in Sydney. A course taken by Milkwood Permaculture. Picture taken by Lucas Ihlein, a participant of the course and another artist whose work will be featured in In the Balance: Art for a changing world.

And, the joyous Angel Street Permaculture garden in Newtown:

Plant List

2010-06-20T20:28:00.011+10:00

After several weeks of sourcing available food plants we have come up with the following list, which we have ordered from several nurseries in NSW and Victoria. We would still like to find a pistachio, so if anyone knows of one in Sydney please send the details to us. Also we welcome those of you in Sydney to come along to the community plant-in day on Saturday 10 July, between 10am - 4pm. Please bring a picnic and a clump of something edible, beneficial or herbal from your garden, or gleaned, that you'd like to see growing in the Food Forest. We're particularly looking for strawberries, thyme, mints, lavender, comfrey, borage, calendula, nasturtiums, sage and any annual or perennial vegetable seeds or seedlings you'd like to plant.

Bush foods and local Cadigal plants:

Pigface

Native parsnip

Coastal rosemary

White root

Dianella caerulea

Lomandra longifolia (Matt Rush)

Westringia fruticosa (Native rosemary)

Podocarpus elatus (Illawara plum)

Acmena smithii (Lilly Pilly)

Riberry

World food plants:

Tangelo

Apricot Moorpark

Necatrine Goldmine

Nectarine Fantasta

Peach Red Noonan

Peach Anzac

Fig Black Genoa

Mulberry Hicks

Multi Graft Plum Satsuma/Mariposa

Cherry Morello

Spanish chestnut

Indian horse chestnut

Pecan Desirable

Almond

Citrus lemon

Citrus lime

Citrus orange

Rosemary

Feijoa

Guava Brazilian

Guava Hawaiian

Grapefruit Rio Red

Kumquat Calamondin

Avocado

Cherimoya White

Lemon Grass

Lemon Verbena

French Sorrel

Mushroom Plant

Loquat Seedling Nagasakiwase

Olive Azapa

Permission to plant

2010-06-18T11:35:00.012+10:00

We have just received a wonderful letter of support from the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council (MLALC), the legal custodians of the Food Forest.

"We hold great pride and respect for our culture and fully support the way in which the food forest will educate the wider community on Aboriginal history and culture." Rebecca McHugh, MLALC

Today we also spoke to Helen from Marrickville Community Nursery, a biodiversity nursery that specialises in plants native to the Cooks River in Sydney. Many of these plants are also native to Surry Hills, so we'll be making our way there shortly to buy bush food plants for the forest.

A list of Cadigal Wangal Edible Plants will benefit any Sydney food garden. To produce food while renewing local ecology is a significant principal of permaculture, and this can be achieved on a balcony, in a backyard or on a farm.

From field to forest

2010-06-01T12:06:00.011+10:00

When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary - Masanobu Fukuoka

While Meg and Zephyr were digging up more potatoes and tickling the first garlic shoots up out of the frosty Djadjawurrung soil in the home garden, Anna Davis (MCA) and Patrick met with the St Michael's church wardens late last week to finalise the agreement to allow the Food Forest to go ahead on this ancient Cadigal site in Surry Hills, Sydney. Here are the set of working drawings Patrick presented to the group on behalf of the Artist as Family. (click for bigger)

Some members from the local community, including both church and non-church groups, have now been asked to choose from this plant list their more desired fruit, herbs and nuts. If you wish to participate in the development of this Food Forest please comment below your desired food plants and we'll see how we can include your suggestions as we begin to source plants. But be quick as we aim to start planting in the first week of July, pending approval from the traditional owners.

Anyone wishing to help us with the planting in July please follow this blog and we'll keep you informed as to the when and how. Indigenous locals and non-indigenous residents who can help build information relating to Cadigal plants and medicines, your input is highly sought after.

Drawing the Food Forest into being

2010-05-20T17:11:00.006+10:00

Elevation impression.

Plan view.

Click on images for greater detail.

Love from Peter Tyndall too

2010-05-18T09:51:00.011+10:00

A little while ago we were required to ask for support letters to apply for funding for the Food Forest. We naturally asked members of our local community – permaculture co-originator David Holmgren and seminal conceptual artist Peter Tyndall. Both David's and Peter's letters were very generous, to say the least.

Patrick, Meg and Zephyr are thoughtful, energetic, articulate and engaged members of this rich local community. What they live and learn and practice here they also offer, as the Artist as Family, for the consideration of others. Last year, I followed them, via their several blogs, through a residency at Newcastle’s This is Not Art festival. I hope to be able to do so again during their participation in the MCA’s In the Balance: Art for a changing world. I recommend them and their application for your support. Peter Tyndall

(Blush, blush, thank you Peter). The Food Forest is a fusion of art and applied ecology, therefore to have this level of support from these two good and brilliant folk gives us much strength and focus as we head closer to realising this work. The union between the conceptual and the ecological is not only about providing interesting (we hope) public art and free ethical food in one combined work, but to make a work that participates in what it represents in healing the apparent rifts between the mind and the body, nature and culture.

For the connoisseur, Peter Tyndall's blog:

Choosing the plants

2010-05-12T09:11:00.011+10:00

We've been writing up a long-list of suitable plants to use in the Food Forest. A short-list selection will be based upon three criteria.

1. the local Cadigal food plants for ecology building.
2. the taste buds of the local community to determine desired foods.
3. the availability of plants from local nurseries.

This short-list palette of plants will help complete the design. In other words, the three plant zones (as seen in the previous post) will be filled in using this diverse palette of edible flora.

1. ground covers, herbs and beneficial flowering plants will skirt the exterior ring of the forest.
2. mid to large sized shrubs and small trees, such as citrus and guava, will predominant.
3. small copse of larger trees such as avocado and macadamia will complete the skywards gradation.

These three zones together will constitute a dynamic polyculture.

What are your favourite edible plants, and do you think they'd grow well in Sydney? We'd love to hear your suggestions.

Re-imagining the city

2010-05-03T13:52:00.008+10:00

Michael Leunig, SMH, May 2010

The Artist as Family, St.M, May 2010

Great News!

2010-05-01T21:22:00.019+10:00

After months of searching and writing proposals, it looks like we have a site, and a beautiful site indeed. Yesterday we heard back from St Michael's and they agree in principal to Food Forest being planted in their front lawn. So, we will be busy over the next week compiling a plant list for the community, making drawings of the proposed work, and putting together an agreement outlining the scope of the work, while identifying the responsible parties.

Patrick swung by to measure up the site this morning, take some more photos and sketch out the footprint of the work. It seemed to suggest a kidney bean shape as we'll have to keep away from tricky underground plumbing services.

Here's an east view of the site and the awesome ficus doing a magnificent job.

Afterwards Patrick walked into the city and had tea with Tessa and Karl, two Sydney artists who are also involved with In the Balance.

Their poetic exhibition Make-do Garden City is on until 8 May at the Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Tessa and Karl's website can be found at Makeshift.

Upstairs in the gallery was the following drawing. It was pretty compelling, recalling Avatar and indigenous folk everywhere, pressurised by the growing needs of expanding technocultures. Apologies to the artist, but a wall label couldn't be found, nor a catalogue, or even anything on the gallery's website to properly credit this detailed work.

Next stop: Marrickville, to have lunch with some family members. After stepping off the bus Patrick came across this beautiful micro-forest front garden and stopped to admire the structure and health of it.

This really is close to the sort of feeling we want to create with Food Forest, only packed with edible and flowering plants.

Possible Sites

2010-04-28T19:22:00.023+10:00

While Meg and Zephyr have been tending the Artist as Family's home garden, Patrick has been in Sydney looking at possible sites to plant the Food Forest. At one point today he was captivated by how wild nature goes about reclaiming urban environments to build habitat.

The following act of self-seeded brilliance is occurring at about 40cm above street level. The spider is a trusty companion, ready to gobble unwanted pests. Competition is often heralded as the main gig in evolution, but co-dependancy and cooperation are as much a part of evolutionary life. Working together and sharing resources and environments is key to interspecies survival.

Later in the day, Patrick and MCA curator Anna Davis arrived at CarriageWorks where they met with the executive producer Jamie Dawson who showed them a couple of possible sites. CarriageWorks is such a beautifully loaded locality that brings with it an enthusiastic community that is showing much support for our project. However, it's a difficult site in terms of planting a forest outdoors, and the awesome space indoors, with great overhead light wells and rain collection opportunities, would sadly restrict the movement of helpful pollinators and predators – lizards, bees, spiders and frogs – into the forest. Jamie and his team would be great to work with, so we're remaining very open.

Next stop: St Michael's church in Surry Hills.

A community member, Heide, living near to the church, contacted the MCA when she heard our project was looking for a home, and mentioned St Michael's as a possible site. Dotted around the world church grounds are currently being transformed into community gardens, which makes good sense as there are often soup kitchens being run from them, and fresh organic produce goes hand in hand with such great initiatives. Also, old churches such as St Michael's generally have 'clean' soil from which heavy metals are absent. Not that a combination of the right plants, compost, biomass, fungi and microbial life couldn't detoxify the soil organically.

We are working with the MCA on a proposal tonight, which will be taken to the church Warden meeting tomorrow night.

There's one or two other things worth noting here before we sign off. Here's a link to William Blake's The Garden of Love, which has been a precursory text for our Food Forest and for Patrick's presentation this coming Friday as part of Open Fields at UTS. Blake's poem is a kind of elegy for a lost erotic Eden; a lament about that which became divided. Rev Frances at St Michael's mentioned Eden too when we briefly met with him today. David Graeber (2007, p23), in a much broader context, bares this fruit on the subject:

Sexual relations, after all, need not be represented as a matter of one partner consuming the other; they can also be imagined as two people sharing food.

If you're in the area on Friday, come by and say g'day to Patrick at UTS. We'd love to hear your tips on what specifically keeps your garden or local environment full of wild love and reciprocity.

Compare This:

2010-04-23T17:50:00.014+10:00

"No, no, no sickness really, only clean one. Because they lived on wild honey and meat. They have been living on bush tucker. Nothing. No tea, no sugar, no ice-cream or lollies, nothing. Only been living on bush honey, bush tomatoes, bush raisins, edible seeds and grass seeds. Any kind of seeds. They lived on yams. No sickness. Nothing, all good. Nothing, they were good living in them days. They only got sick from a cold. Only catching a cold, that's all. No more. No sickness, nothing. Because they living on different food. Yeah, different food bush tucker".

Joe, Ali Curung elder, NT, from Message Stick, series 12, episode 11: The Artists of Ali Curung, ABC iview, April, 2010.

With this:

"According to the archaeological evidence, [early] farmers were more likely than hunter-gatherers to suffer from dental-enamel hypoplasia – a characteristic horizontal striping of the teeth that indicates nutritional stress. Farming results in a less varied and less balanced diet than hunting and gathering does... Farmers were also more susceptible to infectious diseases such as leprosy, tuberculosis and malaria as a result of their settled lifestyles... Dental remains show that farmers suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers' cereal-heavy diets were reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed. Life expectancy...also fell... The settled farmers are invariably less healthy than their free-roaming neighbours. Farmers had to work much longer and harder to produce a less varied and less nutritious diet, and they were far more prone to disease".

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, Atlantic Books, 2009.

With this:

"We want to bring together in this work current ecological philosophies and permaculture activisms, and show the corresponding ties with pre- or less mediated societies – societies who have possessed a land-based intelligence devoid of anxiety, self-harm, material entitlement, depression, food disorders, self-loathing, alienation, hypochondria, mood disorders, cancer, tooth decay, mental illness, diabetes, organised violence, memory loss (or blindness to violence), division of labour and subsequent ecological estrangement".

The Artist as Family, more notes on the Food Forest, April, 2010.

Rocks, logs and leaf litter

2010-04-20T19:31:00.016+10:00

Some notes on the food forest:

1. Create many habitats for predators, such as lizards and frogs.

2. Create a site of intense biodiversity – flora and fauna – to help allay pests.

3. Allow fruit, nuts and berries not consumed by humans or non-humans to be left to compost on the forest floor.

4. Allow plants to seed, fruit and regenerate naturally by open pollination.

5. The food produced must remain uncapitalised and free from pesticides and other synthetics.

6. The intent of the forest is to trigger a foraging vibe for humans and non-humans local to the site.

7. To design the forest so it becomes self operating, self feeding and self watering.

8. Combine indigenous and exotic flora.

9. Create a 'green pharmacy' with many herbs.

10. Plant companion plants in close proximity to one another.

11. Bring in much biomass, top soil and compost to help create an organic base for the site.

12. This work is a fabrication, an artwork, based upon biomimicry. It participates in what it represents: a reunion of the conceptual with the corporeal; the mind with the body; man with woman; human with non-human; food with ecology; poetics with pragmatism.

Letter of support from David Holmgren

2010-04-08T12:02:00.005+10:00

My support for this project comes from my expertise in the sustainability of our food supply system and positive design based responses at the household and community level that rebuild local, low impact ways of providing food. David Holmgren.

Read on by clicking on this image.

Invitation formally accepted

2010-04-08T11:59:00.001+10:00

Click for bigger.

New pioneers, old future

2010-04-04T16:25:00.009+10:00

The ontological shift for an ecologically sustainable future has much to gain from the worldviews of ancient civilisations and diverse cultures which survived sustainably over the centuries. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

Thanks for this Detroit link, Anna. We've now watched Requiem for Detroit too. Bonza!

Open Fields

2010-04-04T11:23:00.008+10:00

Please come along to this if you're in Sydney on April 30. Patrick will be outlining our project to date.

Click for bigger.

For more info go to Open Fields.

A Direct Action

2010-03-27T19:05:00.004+11:00

The problem with so much of the art we see today is that it is reduced to the symbolic; it is a mediation, and is not really of the world.

What we are trying to do with our food forest project is say: abstracted life has lost its appeal, it has caused too much division and separation. With a forest of food as a public art work, we aim to show how art can again be of the world, a part of it and not merely a symbol of it. It can put back in, not just take and make waste.

Our systems, based on growth capital, have failed – resource wars, divided society, pollution, class wars, mental illness, alienation – and however glaringly obvious the fact of all this is, the level of denial remains in the symbols that surround us. Be they on billboards, television, online or in galleries, our symbolic medias are powerful and manipulative, they collectively report back to us that we are advanced and thoughtful people who can live in a world unrelated to the microbial world below our feet. This is ecological disembodiment, and the ramifications for this separated, abstracted life are proving to be disastrous for the planet.

As a mass culture we have been flattered by a sense of our own progress and sophistication, and artists and ad people have worked hard to keep this middle-class myth alive, but beyond the seductive veneers and images, progress, and the mediation of progress, is concretely killing us.

If we are to re-embed ourselves in the cycles of wild nature, and by doing so have a chance at surviving what lies for us on the horizon, then our symbolic and domesticated states have to be confronted. Our symbolic, mediated, head-only orientations require interventions by our bodies, and those things that are essential to life – air, water, food, soil, dynamic ecology, habitable climate – become again the things most highly valued and respected.

The project of world peace, to think big, is the project of dismantling the spells of mediation, symbol and image that annul, disempower and calibrate us to the dominant ideology.

Art requires a direct action that's no longer ironising and cowardly, no longer self-conscious, anxious or innovative, but rather real and essential; a re-embodiment of natural systems.

A Food Forest

2010-02-24T20:35:00.002+11:00

As a result of the project we did in Newcastle, we are very excited to share the news that we have been invited to participate in the In the balance: art for a changing world show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney from 19 August to 23 November 2010.

In preparation for our project, we have visited Sydney twice in the last month. The first time we travelled by plane, but after measuring our carbon footprint between Melbourne and Sydney we decided to travel by car on interstate journeys henceforth; by bike on local journeys and by bus, train and tram on any subsequent journeys. In fact we have made the decision never to fly again until air travel is fuelled by non-polluting renewable resources.

Click for bigger.

The project we have proposed for the MCA is a community food forest. Although we will have a presence in the gallery for the show, the main part of our work will comprise fruit and nut trees planted amongst vegetation that is indigenous to Sydney; bush plants that the Cadigal, the traditional owners of the inner Sydney city region, relied on for food.

As you can imagine, one of the most important elements of a project like this is finding the right location. On our last two Sydney trips, we have ventured all over the city in search of just the right site.

We visited Murralappi, the Settlement Neighbourhood Centre,

Frog Hollow,

Fred Miller Park,

and numerous other parks, but the one we have our fingers crossed the most for is Ward Park, in Surry Hills.

This is the corner of the park we hope to plant out. It's roughly 300sqm.

Before we drove home, we went to Ward Park once more to measure up

to pick up rubbish

to sketch our proposed food growing area

and to imagine the nearby residents looking down at the forest to see what fruit is in season.

Mapping Our Menu

2010-02-05T21:45:00.008+11:00

For the next three years, Patrick will be a student again, undertaking research for his doctoral thesis in the areas of ecology and poetics. Part of his research is to document our family's transition from being oil dependent to as self-sufficient as we can be in terms of water, energy and food.

We have solar panels, water tanks and bikes. But what about our food?

We have been spending a lot of time in the garden talking about what it will take for our family to become self-sustaining in terms of what we eat. So, to determine how far we have to go, we decided to mark the beginning of our journey by spending 24 hours eating the food we have growing here in our garden or provided by our chickens, and the public food we are able to forage locally. No salt and pepper, no butter, oil or any condiments. We only drank our own rain water. We didn't drive anywhere all day and we didn't spend any money.

7:06 am
7:08 am
7:10 am
7:13 am
7:20 am
7:26 am
9:32 am
9:35 am
9:48 am
11:07 am
11:35 am
11:45 am
12:39 pm
12:44 pm
1:24 pm
5:12 pm
7:46 pm
7:50 pm
8:13 pm
8:27 pm
As you can see, we by no means went hungry, though we all lacked energy throughout the day, had headaches at one time or another, and felt lackluster.

Patrick: I experienced a mild depression along with a headache. As the head gardener in the Artist as Family, I know how much work it takes to generate our own food, and this challenge - or experiment - really emphasised the enormous task we have of becoming self-sufficient.

Zephyr: Just before lunch I had a nap!! I haven't done that since I was three years old.

Meg: I had a meeting to attend in the afternoon. While I was sitting in it, I couldn't help but feel that the issues that were being discussed that I normally feel are vital and worth discussing, were completely irrelevant compared to the imperative issue of finding food for one's self and one's family.

40% of greenhouse gases come from industrial agriculture (supermarket food): pesticides, fertilisers, tractors, harvesters, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, lighting etc. Food prices are only going to rise courtesy of peak oil. Communities that start to plan for energy descent now will be better off in the long run. What the Artist as Family is learning, is that relocalisation is a several year transition.

17 Days

2009-10-11T22:13:00.000+11:00

Well, our residency has come to an end. In 17 days, we have collected much rubbish and many friends. We love Newcastle and are sorry to leave, though we are looking forward to returning to our community, our garden and our chickens. To everybody we met, thank you for making us feel so welcome, and to everybody who followed our journey on this blog, thank you so much for your support.

But before we bid you adieu for now, we hope you enjoy this short film about our time here. Until next time, signing off, The Artist as Family.

Thirsty Work

2009-10-10T20:08:00.003+11:00

Now that our Lock-Up exhibition has been and gone, today we relaxed somewhat. Meg and Zeph took to the streets on their bikes as sightseers and Patrick worked on the film.

The lady behind the counter of the kiosk at Newcastle Main Beach told us that the local council asked them not to sell any drinks in glass as they are likely to end up smashed and injuring someone. So instead they only sell plastic bottles that get left on the sand or placed into one of the many bins that go straight to landfill sites without being sorted. It's a lose-lose situation.

Today as we navigated the beaches and streets, we were very impressed at how many water bubblers we came across – a fantastic council initiative to encourage people to rehydrate without having to pay money for a disposable bottle.

The Bins Full

2009-10-09T20:56:00.003+11:00

We were in the Newcastle Herald today! Here is the photo that accompanied the article:

After breakfast, we donned latex gloves and began the task of sorting our accumulated waste: recyclable, non-recyclable, and organic matter.

We had set aside the weekend to disassemble our collection, though in 6 hours we had finished; the bins full, the exercise yard swept clean.

It was Zeph's job to gather and flatten all the cans. So after lunch, he and Patrick biked the 4 kilograms of aluminium to Hunter Recyclers where Zeph received $5 for his efforts (with which he bought a block of dark chocolate he generously shared with us elders).

Meanwhile, Meg was kicking back at the Loft Youth Venue, not far from the Lock-Up, where she gave a blogging workshop to a great group of students.

If you live locally and were planning to come down to see our show over the weekend, we're sorry, but the show is no longer. But stay tuned to these www's, as our short film about our residency will be screening here shortly.

Mottainai!

2009-10-08T21:47:00.003+11:00

With three days left of our residency, our two main tasks are to process the waste we have gleaned in the best way we can, and to finish making the short creative documentary of our time here.

Here is a sneak peak from the film so far:

This afternoon, journalist Greg Ray and photographer Jonathan Carroll, from the Newcastle Herald came to the Lock-Up to interview us and photograph our expanding waste line. In the beginning of our stay, two and a half weeks in Newcastle seemed like a long time. Seeing all the rubbish we have collected through Jonathan's and Ray's eyes, we were able to see how much we had collected in a slightly objective way and we were filled with an aching regret that our culture's consumption leaves us with so much waste that can't be reused.

The Japanese call this mottainai, a term that Wikipedia defines as:

"...a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilised." The expression Mottainai! can be uttered alone as an exclamation when something useful, such as food or time, is wasted.

Going Backwards

2009-10-07T09:24:00.000+11:00

From today's Age:

State's rubbish heap becoming a mountain

Recycling has gone backwards in Victoria for the first time this century, with an increase in organic waste being dumped into landfill, and mountains of glass sitting unprocessed at recycling plants.

While households are becoming more recycling conscious, the amount of some types of commercial and construction waste being re-processed has fallen sharply.

Recycling of organic rubbish - forestry waste, garden clippings and food - fell 20 per cent in 2007-08, according to a Victorian Recycling Industries survey. The drop was 14 per cent for glass and 4 per cent for construction and demolition waste.

The drop ends a decade of rapid growth for the recycling industry.

More organic waste in landfill poses a second problem - boosting greenhouse gas emissions. When massed in landfill it emits methane, a greenhouse gas about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Environment Victoria campaigner Fraser Brindley said recycling had been hit by two events: the financial crisis affecting demand for recycled goods and State Government policies not supplying the incentive to boost recycling.

The rest here.

Never Mind

2009-10-06T20:46:00.018+11:00

Our camera stopped working yesterday, a terrible thing to happen to a family of bloggers. This image is one of the last shots we took of our pile before it flipped out.

This morning we biked to a service centre from where we are hoping to hear good news. The technician we spoke to said she would do her best, though she was hesitant to say she could fix it, because it is six years old.

"Why spend money fixing an old camera when you can spend less getting a brand new model?" She asked. A valid question. If you are talking about the cost of things in dollars.

"Because we subscribe to the Repair Manifesto," we told her.

"I'm glad there are people like you," she smiled. "Otherwise I'd be out of a job."

As we left the service centre and pedalled towards the beach, we all agreed that that Repair should be added to the Reduce. Reuse. Recycle trinity. We can definitely see the merit of the first two actions, but the third? It's no wonder it features so far down the waste hierarchy:

When people choose to buy bottled water instead of soft drinks, the individual health benefits may be high, but the energy spent and pollution created to drink (or eat) anything from disposables has a great societal toll, regardless of what the vessel holds.

Every day as we bend to pick up forlorn plastic bottles on whichever beautiful beach we are on, we marvel at the complete lack of care exhibited by those who litter. But today on the beach, as we collected we talked about people, ourselves included, who buy packaged drink or food and then put the waste in a recycling or regular bin, thinking we've done the right thing.

Lest we feel too hopeful that we can properly process the waste we have collected over the last 12 days, here's Donovan Hohn to set us straight:

Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down...

Our Artist Talk

2009-10-05T20:24:00.003+11:00

We presented our artist talk today in front of a small and enthusiastic crowd of temporary jailbirds. Our talk was the last scheduled event on the Critical Animals line-up. If you are reading this blog for the first time today because you were handed our card by Zeph at our talk, welcome and thanks for coming along today.

If you couldn't make it to the Lock-Up today: our talk was about our project, waste, steady-state economics (in which economic activities fit within the capacity of ecosystems), permaculture, future scenarios, our Daylesford community and the Hepburn Relocalisation Network and our relationship with waste.

A big thanks goes to Gerry Bobsien from the Lock-Up for taking these photos and for her ongoing support. And likewise to Aden Rolfe, Co-Director of Critical Animals, for his enthusiasm for our project and for helping us pick up rubbish very early one morning.

Brrrm Brrrm

2009-10-04T20:55:00.002+11:00

To get to Bar Beach, one of our regular rubbish collecting spots, we like to ride through the peaceful King Edward Park. But this morning the park and all the surrounding roads were closed for the Mattara Hill Climb motorcar race.

For the last 13 years, the general public has been denied access to Melbourne's Albert Park Lake for the Grand Prix. Doesn't it seem comically ironic that in this day and age, fossil fuel burning car races are still being sanctioned by local governments and their communities? In public parks??

When sea levels rise so that entire coastline settlements, such as Newcastle, are swallowed by the oceans, will the major sponsors of car races be held liable? When the Earth's increasing temperature renders large parts of our dry continent uninhabitable, will we hold our governments accountable? We can say the science was there, so why didn't they act? The science is murled by the media, so it's no wonder the public is confused as to the seriousness of the problem. But politicians are paid large sums to read the data and be informed, not by pro-business opinion writers but by non-commercial scientists.

From gleaning rubbish every day for the last 10 days we have a very clear picture of which major companies are responsible for the majority of the waste. Harsh authoritarian law-making is certainly problematic and unwanted, but isn't anything-goes-liberalism, where large corporates are allowed to profit by producing anti-ecological products and spectacles equally as troubling? Is a pro-ecological liberalism possible, where businesses have free range to do as they please as long as their activities remain embedded in an economic system based on the steady-state of a healthy ecology, not the fantasy of endless resources?

To what point will inaction be tolerated?

Image

Free Wheelin'

2009-10-03T17:09:00.001+10:00

TINA, the This is Not Art festival has started so Newcastle is abuzz with young folk keen to take part in some way. There are exhibitions, forums, artist talks, movies, music gigs, poetry readings, performance art and an exercise yard full of local trash collected over the last 9 days.

We two adults came up to Newcastle for TINA last year and it feels good to be back, this time with Zeph to share the experience. And our bikes. Last year we were on foot, but this year it's great to have our own wheels. Riding, stopping somewhere to pick up rubbish, then riding to our next destination.

It's so fun to ride around the city and wave at all the other cyclists on their Bike Library bikes, recognisable by their individual nameplates.

An Economy of Forgetting

2009-10-02T18:36:00.012+10:00

"What’s most nefarious about plastic... is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something — anything — could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting."

Donovan Hohn, 'Moby-Duck: Or, the synthetic wilderness of childhood'

The Aesthetics of Waste

2009-10-01T20:13:00.003+10:00

Spending this past week gleaning waste has made us realise that we are a society happy to dispose of rubbish readily because we have little relationship to it. At home we don't have a relationship with this sort of waste – we simply don't buy these kinds of products. We grow food, compost and bulk buy as much as we can. We haven't yet worked out how to do without plastic and other disposables altogether, but we're working on it.

Did you know that humans are the only land mammals who defecate in their drinking water? Instead of seeing our bodily waste as compost to be used to help fertilise our food and environment, we avoid dealing with it at all costs. Surely if we have no relationship to our own waste, we will find it difficult to have a relationship to any other.

As we pick up rubbish each day, we are trying to build a relationship with it. One of the best ways we do this is through narrative: we make up stories about the situation that led to the discarding of that broken sunglasses arm, the split boogie board, the rolled up nappy, the beer bottle.

There are other ways to tell stories with waste too. The local primary school where Zeph has been in attendance for the last four days had a Marble Run competition, where students constructed courses made from waste for marbles to travel along.

Here are some of the entries:

Aren't they great? The Marble Run is definitely one of the activities Zeph is excited to take back to his classmates at home.

Here is another example of creative recycling we have come across in Newcastle, from a shop of local designers called Make Space:

And then there are artists such as US-based David Edgar who uses recycled plastic to raise awareness about the ill health of our natural habitats.

Of course recycling our waste is better than just dumping it, but one of the potential problems of aestheticising it is glorifying its existence in the world. In the same way carbon offsetting has become just another way to justify a lack of environmental conscientiousness.

But we are guilty of that too. We flew to Newcastle because we figured the work we would do here justified our air travel. We are artists, therefore we are natural mediators. We have to remain aware of this. When we take a photo of our mounting waste at the end of each day, we are specific with our lighting and our camera angles, wanting to make the shot look as good as it can. Perhaps this is just another form of disconnection too? We are creating representations here. You can't smell the stench that is beginning to emanate from the exercise yard, online.

Every One

2009-09-30T22:10:00.002+10:00

How Did We Get Here?

2009-09-29T23:06:00.003+10:00

It doesn't look like much, just a regular pile of beach flotsam that one would ordinarily walk right past. But when you spend all day at the beach looking down at such debris, you see the small aqua square of plastic, the cigarette butt and the top of the icy-pole stick. We could have chosen a photo containing far more waste but thought we'd use this one to give you an indication of the minutiae of so many of our minutes.

Although we still picked up the larger trash items today, we mainly concentrated on the small. Slowing down and focusing gave us time to contemplate and wonder and ask, How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place in our society that nearly every broken wave upon a beach contains some fragment, however small, of oil-based waste?

These questions make us think about this book, that we adults were both read as kids. We bought it for Zeph a few days ago in an op shop, for him to find on our shelves when he becomes more curious.

The questions we asked ourselves today both started and ended with these foodstuffs, gifted to us by Gerry, the Director of the Lock-Up and the co-keeper of the soil and chickens from whence these goods did come. We are missing our garden and our hens so these gifts are much appreciated.

To help us answer the question of how our culture got so tangled up in this anthropocentric mess we looked to the walls of the Lock-Up's exercise yard for some answers.

Each marking tells a story of circumstance and place, that is rich with history and individual misfortune, but doesn't quite answer our question as specifically or collectively as we'd hoped.

Our search continues.

Social Warming

2009-09-28T20:00:00.002+10:00

There's a café just down the road from the Lock-Up that roasts its own coffee using the energy they create by burning their own waste. A fantastic idea. I wonder when such actions are going to be the norm rather than the exception.

Around the corner from that café is a laundromat we took our washing to this morning. Outside it are some planter boxes in which the owners have planted vegetables and herbs. "Why have flowers when we can grow vegetables?" They asked us. "Why don't more people grow their own food?" We wondered back.

We found other food today. Though unfortunately not all of it was edible.

Mostly we just found rubbish. I guess because that's what we were looking for.

At one point in the afternoon we found some trash that was a little out of our reach.

So we had to ask some of our feathered friends to help us.

Normally nimble Zephyr would have climbed that fence in one swift swoop and retrieved the rubbish from atop. But today Zephyr spent the day at the local primary school where he joined a class of other grade ones. School holidays have already begun in Victoria, but being the sociable kid that he is, Zephyr jumped at the chance to hang out with some peers and talk about his experience as one third of the Artist as Family. Here is some of the work he did today:

Although we're meeting lots of people, kids have an innate knack of social warming wherever they may be. And Zephs' brand new school was no exception. When we went to pick him up at the end of the day, we were invited over for a play at Perry's house, one of the kids from his class.

We ate delicious cake and drank tea (Meg's first good cuppa since we arrived)

and helped out with another art project: making Xmas tree decorations to be sold at Perry's school's upcoming school fair.

But not everything is always fair. Zeph declared it was most unfair that we couldn't move to Newcastle so he could play with Perry and his other new friends every day.

Meanwhile, our own project continues to grow.

A Wealth of Waste

2009-09-27T19:53:00.004+10:00

It was a beautiful day here in Newcastle, despite the gale force winds. After breakfast we headed to the beach where the lifeguards were doing their exercises.

As we bobbed up and down on the sand filling our bags with plastic, we joked that those lifesavers were for the humans and we were for the ocean; for the birds, the fish, the seaweed.

We spent the majority of the day picking up junk, singing, laughing, having competitions to see who could pick up the most lollipop sticks in the shortest amount of time (five in a single minute).

We looked high.

We looked low.

We looked like happy holidaymakers when we took this photo of ourselves.

Then we took the day's wealth of waste back to the exercise yard at the Lock-Up. Underneath our collection are two holes in the concrete, where two tall poles once stood. Legend has it that the dangerous prisoners were tethered on a short chain to one, and the slightly less so on a slightly longer chain, to the other. Society used to dump their social waste here, so it's a fitting site for our project's exhibition.

After we dumped our waste, some visitors came in to see what we'd been doing. One of them said that it looked like someone was camping there. Patrick made up this sign to leave nearby in case anybody tried to remove our goods, as the cleaners did at this little show a while ago.

About Time

2009-09-26T19:49:00.004+10:00

Having our residency in an old jail really pronounces our ideas about time and how we choose to spend it. One of the important aspects of our project is time decompression. This morning we woke to blustery dustery gales outside, which would have made it difficult to ride our bikes anywhere. Although we were free to leave the building, we still felt like prisoners of sorts.

The This is Not Art festival starts this coming Thursday, so we are pressed for time to get some kind of exhibition of our work ready. Having a looming booming deadline is a great motivator, but it's also a great tool for compressing time. Today we tried to strike the balance of working towards something and drifting at the pace of our own clocks.

After the wind quietened down, we biked here and there, picking up rubbish as we went, ending up like storm-water inevitably does, at the beach.

Our goal was to pick up as much plastic as we could to add to what we have collected up until now:

The beaches here are so beautiful, one of the reasons we thought Newcastle the ideal place for an Artist as Family adventure. While the littlest artist busied himself with paying homage to the land art movement of the 60s,

we two older ones combed the beach for waste, looking much like our chickens at home do as they forage in the soil for grubs.

Here's a pic of what we found today, soaking in the sink when we got home.

Open Cycle Ecology

2009-09-25T20:39:00.004+10:00

After our first night, we woke early, left the Lock-Up and headed out into the morning's sun.

Before we left Victoria we had a stamp made up to help us publicise our project. This morning we found some old boxes which we set about cutting into small squares. One of us cut, one stamped and one affixed some double-sided tape to the back.

Another thing we did before we left home was to contact Dan the Bike Man from the Newcastle Bike Ecology Centre to organise three bikes for us to use while we are here. So with our advertising propaganda ready we headed off to Dan's house, the helmets that we brought with us from home, tied to our belts and banging against our legs while we adventured.

We walked and we walked. We filled our backpacks with as much plastic waste as we could carry, and we took turns putting our cards in all the many pockets of this city.

We walked and we walked (it was further than we thought). We sang and we sweated and we practiced social warming with all the locals that we met, some of whom outstretched their arms to embrace us when we told them about our project.

Dan the Bike Man established the bike library three years ago. It is made up of recycled and reclaimed bikes, collected and donated by volunteers and community people. A bike library! Isn't that just the coolest?!

After we selected our bikes, we were handed spanners and instructions so we could modify them to our individual heights.

That's James, one of the many generous volunteers on the left, and Dan on the right. (When Dan signs off his emails, he writes, Bike hugs, Dan.)

When you open up the newspaper to see it filled with ads for expensive watches and cars and flat screen TVs, it can make you wonder what on Earth we human beings are saying to convince ourselves that business is OK to carry on as usual.

When you visit a place like the bike library and meet some of the people whose energy goes in to its survival, you really come to understand the full capacity of social warming.

Day One

2009-09-24T21:05:00.002+10:00

Greetings from the Artist as Family!

After a tour of our accommodation and the Lock-Up Cultural Centre we took to the streets. And after coming across this street-side line-up of herbs we were feeling very positive about our adoptive city.

All morning, Zeph kept asking, 'When are we going to the beach?' So. Our first stop: the beach. He hadn't even been on the sand five minutes and he had collected this handful of discarded plastic. If you were to look out across the beach, you would think it was pretty clean, but take a closer look and you might find this amount in any two metre radius.

Waste proliferates along every coastline the world over. But it's obvious not everybody is happy about this.

Our Proposal (excerpted)

2009-07-17T18:43:00.014+10:00

The whole idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

Waste and Time – an Artist-as-Family adventure
Newcastle Lock-up Artist-in-Residence Sept-Oct 2009.

The Artist-as-family includes Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones and Zephyr Ogden Jones. We propose a multi-tiered residency that includes gleaned waste collection, filmmaking, blogging and an exhibition about what we find while in Newcastle.

Things that may help you understand our working holiday.

3 types of waste.

1. Compostable waste – is not really waste at all as it is returned to the earth to feed new life as part of a closed-cycle system.

2. Non-compostable waste – is material that breaks down slowly, does not feed the natural world, and harms the environment as part of a broken-cycle system – aggregate-growth capitalism.

3. Social waste – wage slavery, anti-ecological schooling, punitive punishment.

3 types of time.

1. Cyclical and airy time – traditional cultures are very good at this type of time. Time decompression, as contiguous with biomimicry and permacultural practices, will be a main focus of our residency.

2. Linear time – birth, school, work, death as specific to industrialised culture. Time compression enabling wage-slavery and other forms of social bondage. Linear time is anti-ecological, it helps create a disposable and wasteful society.

3. Doing time – serving a prison sentence and being trapped in the cycle of offending. Much has been written over time of the interrelationship between privatising things and prisons. Prisons, it could be said, are a middle-class phenomenon, and part-and-parcel of class war.

The exhibition.

Patrick will build an installation with the waste that the AaF find in the streets. The exhibition's theme will be based upon these lines: a reliance upon the importation of resources is our society’s zeitgeist. A centre large enough to rely upon importing resources will never be sustainable. Therefore the food has to be walking distance, and composting is the key to this future society.

Social warming.

Meg will build an offline-online community around the residency based upon chance encounters and by strengthening relationships already formed. She will keep this blog updated to record the AaF's encounters as we glean materials and meet people in Newcastle. These entries will be based on chance encounters and shared stories. Through this social warming aspect of the work we hope to meet people who will offer their time here and there to collect materials with us, expanding the shared labour of this AaF activity.

Zephyr.

As seven year-old Zephyr’s attention will come in and out of focus and be mainly concerned with play opportunities. While in Newcastle, we aim to structure the day with a good balance of work and play. We three will start the day with a two-hour drift, scouring for material, talking to people, exercising and generally being a part of the social space of the city. Then the rest of the day will be broken up with one parent concentrating on the requirements of the residency, while one parent concentrating on the requirements of Zephyr.

Zephyr is an outgoing child. He may like to speak to primary school kids who come to the Lock-Up about his experiences. Meg and Patrick will also speak to visitors to The Lock-Up, TINA festival goers and other interested parties about the work we are doing as a family in Newcastle.

The Lock-Up.

Interrelations with Lock-Up staff will be essential for the success of the residency. Whereas we will aim to carry out the majority of the work to ensure a successful residency and exhibition, we will need assistance and local knowledge to make sure the wider community access and enjoy the work and skills we bring to Newcastle. And while in Newcastle ensuring we also glean skills, ideas and social warming from staff and fellow Novocastrians.