Artist as Family: A Wealth of Waste

Sunday, 27 September 2009

A Wealth of Waste

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.

5 comments:

farmdoc27 September 2009 at 20:22
The composition of, and colour in, the lifesaver photograph makes it truly outstanding. Nice one, AaF. xxx
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WriterBee27 September 2009 at 20:37
So pleased to see you guys are having such a great time, Family as Artist. Can't wait to see what develops over the time you are there.xx
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MrO28 September 2009 at 16:57
P+M+Z.

Here I go again! The blogsite looks great even the occassional lifeguard in budgie smugglers. V.cold here in Daylesford. Been out battling the Oxalis weed in my garden.

Looking @ your collection I immediately thought of games to play with the rubbish.

Straws: Pick-Up-Sticks
Drink Bottles: 10 Pin Bowling
(will require tennis ball)
Caps: Chalk in a game of checkers on the concrete floor
Plastic Tape: BlindMans Bluff or Pin The Rubbish On The Donkey (drawn on wall or use Patrick..)

Also weaving into little mats or wrist bands or wallets or stubbie holders..

Make a dress, bag or budgie smugglers....

Just a thought...

xPete
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Permapoesis28 September 2009 at 17:06
deep chuckles here mr O, thanks for the list of games; like we're on a P&O cruiser/waste breaker and the floating islands of petro-chem waste are our ultimate destination. p
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Kate29 September 2009 at 14:45
Excuse me but is that me in that family shot? When and how did that happen?
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About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.