Artist as Family: book

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Peddling and pedalling our book

We're taking off in 9 days on a pedal-fuelled book tour, traversing two states and a territory and many more countries than terra nullius would care to comment on.

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Here is our schedule:

Woodend — Friday 30th October 2015 4pm New Leaves Books
Kyneton — Saturday 31st October 3pm Aesop's Attic (2pm foraging walk)
Violet Town — Wednesday 4th Nov 6pm Murrnong Farm
Beechworth — Sunday 8th November 3pm Collins
Albury — Thursday 12th Nov 3pm Dymocks
Tumbarumba —Thursday 19th November 6pm Nest Cinema (5.30pm foraging walk)
Tumut — Saturday 21st November 3pm Night Owl Books
Yass — Wednesday 25th November 5.30pm Yass Library
Canberra — Saturday 28th Nov 3pm Paperchain Books (1.30pm foraging walk)
Bowral — Wednesday 2nd Dec 4.30pm The Moose Hub (as part of Green Drinks)
Sydney — Saturday 5th December 3pm Florilegium (intro by Kirsten Bradley)
Blackheath —Thursday 10 December 5.30pm Gleebooks Blue Mountains
Berry — Saturday 2nd Jan 2016 3pm Our Bookshop and Cafe
Nowra — Tuesday 5th January 3pm Dean Swift Books
Huskisson — Thursday 7th January 3pm Boobook on Owen
Moruya — TBC Moruya Books
Bega — Saturday 16th January 3pm Candelo Books (2pm foraging walk)
Bairnsdale — TBC (f)route + Collins

We look forward to seeing you on the road.

Thursday, 1 October 2015

A day of release

We've been home 9 months and today our book hits the shelves,

as a book, e-book and audio book.

We're launching The Art of Free Travel in both Daylesford and Melbourne so please come by and help us celebrate. David Holmgren (below left) is launching it in Daylesford and Adam Grubb (below right) is launching in Melbourne.

For a sneak peek, here is our book trailer made by our mate Anthony Petrucci:

We hope you enjoy reading or listening to The Art of Free Travel. Stay tuned for news about our forthcoming book tour.

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’.