Artist as Family: July 2013

Monday, 8 July 2013

Rent our home for a year

Open plan, double-glazed, solar powered, fully furnished (negotiable), permaculture house and garden in Daylesford, Victoria. Short restorative bush walks to Lake Daylesford and mineral waters and even shorter walks to town. Buses to railway stations for possible car-free living.

Shop for groceries at the Hepburn Wholefoods Collective, walk and bike everywhere, order your organic vegie boxes direct from nearby farms, grow your own food in our garden's delicious soil and/or at one of the community gardens, walk out and camp in the surrounding bushland, shop for clothes at the community op-shop or see the latest films at the community run cinema.

However you want to live, come and trial living in Daylesford for a year. Our home is two bedrooms although the study/office can become a third bedroom. Apart from extensive fruit trees, the garden also features chooks and ducks, a trampoline, rainwater tanks and a dog run. We will remove all personal belongings from the house so as it is as much a neutral space we can provide for you to make your home. However happy to leave plates, cutlery, pots etc...

lounge

kitchen and dining

main bedroom

entrance

southside

produce

$350 per week plus bond. Available from Novemember 2013.

Call us for more information or to arrange an inspection: Meg 0418 523 308 or Patrick 0400 897 850.

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’.