Artist as Family: nut trees

Tuesday, 6 July 2010

The First Trees

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.

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

From field to forest

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.

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’.