Artist as Family: June 2010

Monday, 28 June 2010

Cross-community purposes

Back in April, when we were desperate to find a home for the Food Forest, CarriageWorks tried really hard to accommodate us; we just couldn't find enough raw dirt to work with for our particular project. But while visiting CarriageWorks we got to see what the community was able to grow in terms of food, high up in the air, and it was pretty damn exciting. There are peeps all over the world growing food on balconies, rooftops and in sunlit living rooms. Projects like the CarriageWorks Kitchen Garden show us that you don't necessarily need a plot of land to relocalise your food supply.

Find out more here.

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Here comes everybody

Augmenting the spirit of our forthcoming Plant-in Day:

Alexandria permablitz in Sydney. A course taken by Milkwood Permaculture. Picture taken by Lucas Ihlein, a participant of the course and another artist whose work will be featured in In the Balance: Art for a changing world.

And, the joyous Angel Street Permaculture garden in Newtown:

Sunday, 20 June 2010

Plant List

After several weeks of sourcing available food plants we have come up with the following list, which we have ordered from several nurseries in NSW and Victoria. We would still like to find a pistachio, so if anyone knows of one in Sydney please send the details to us. Also we welcome those of you in Sydney to come along to the community plant-in day on Saturday 10 July, between 10am - 4pm. Please bring a picnic and a clump of something edible, beneficial or herbal from your garden, or gleaned, that you'd like to see growing in the Food Forest. We're particularly looking for strawberries, thyme, mints, lavender, comfrey, borage, calendula, nasturtiums, sage and any annual or perennial vegetable seeds or seedlings you'd like to plant.

Bush foods and local Cadigal plants:

Pigface

Native parsnip

Coastal rosemary

White root

Dianella caerulea

Lomandra longifolia (Matt Rush)

Westringia fruticosa (Native rosemary)

Podocarpus elatus (Illawara plum)

Acmena smithii (Lilly Pilly)

Riberry

World food plants:

Tangelo

Apricot Moorpark

Necatrine Goldmine

Nectarine Fantasta

Peach Red Noonan

Peach Anzac

Fig Black Genoa

Mulberry Hicks

Multi Graft Plum Satsuma/Mariposa

Cherry Morello

Spanish chestnut

Indian horse chestnut

Pecan Desirable

Almond

Citrus lemon

Citrus lime

Citrus orange

Rosemary

Feijoa

Guava Brazilian

Guava Hawaiian

Grapefruit Rio Red

Kumquat Calamondin

Avocado

Cherimoya White

Lemon Grass

Lemon Verbena

French Sorrel

Mushroom Plant

Loquat Seedling Nagasakiwase

Olive Azapa

Friday, 18 June 2010

Permission to plant

We have just received a wonderful letter of support from the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council (MLALC), the legal custodians of the Food Forest.

"We hold great pride and respect for our culture and fully support the way in which the food forest will educate the wider community on Aboriginal history and culture." Rebecca McHugh, MLALC

Today we also spoke to Helen from Marrickville Community Nursery, a biodiversity nursery that specialises in plants native to the Cooks River in Sydney. Many of these plants are also native to Surry Hills, so we'll be making our way there shortly to buy bush food plants for the forest.

A list of Cadigal Wangal Edible Plants will benefit any Sydney food garden. To produce food while renewing local ecology is a significant principal of permaculture, and this can be achieved on a balcony, in a backyard or on a farm.

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’.