Artist as Family: August 2010

Sunday, 22 August 2010

Bloomin' inspiring

Vote 1 Peter Cundall!

We got to spend much of the day yesterday with one of the most generous and knowledgeable sustainability gurus. We learned so much about plants and soil, garden pests and wildlife, and how an 84 year old man has lived on organic food for fifty years, has a clean bill of health, and in this time has never taken any pharmaceutical medicines.

He inspired and delighted us, but one thing he said really stood out:

"Show children how to create: the best way to do this is to show them how to grow something. Children who know how to create things never grow into adults who destroy things."

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Thursday, 19 August 2010

Sprung

If you were anywhere near the top end of Albion Street, Surry Hills yesterday and you heard a high-pitched squeal, it was us! It was our first visit to the Food Forest since the Plant-In five weeks ago.

In the town we live in, in Victoria, we are still in the grips of winter: rain, frost, sleet, snow.

But here in Sydney, spring has sprung, the proof of which we saw in the Forest.

Food Forest is going to be officially opened on Saturday 21 August at 2.30pm, with a ~~floor~~ forest talk by the Artist as Family and gardening guru, Peter Cundall. Hope to see you there.

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’.