Artist as Family: Going Backwards

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Going Backwards

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.

3 comments:

Nicola9 October 2009 at 11:00
Hey Meg
I got a shock when I realised the date today- I've been so busy with things- I'd still really love it if you wanted to come over to have a cuppa. I rang this morning and left my number with Kerri, but I'll try again later today. I'm in Sydney tomorrow-do you have any time on Sunday?
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Meg9 October 2009 at 13:16
Sunday would be great! I shall get your number from Kerrie and phone you today. Hope you are well.
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DreamNT25 June 2018 at 18:52
Have a safe and wonderful time!

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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’.