Artist as Family: micro-farm

Saturday, 1 May 2010

Great News!

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.

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’.