Artist as Family: Three stellar women

Sunday, 13 April 2014

Three stellar women

We were fortunate to meet three stellar women while we stayed in Iluka.

The first, Linda Marney, welcomed us onboard the ferry from Yamba and offered us her flat as a sanctuary while we awaited a bike part to come from Brisbane. Linda has a wealth of experience in all things maritime and spent several years sailing up the east coast of Australia. Her most recent project has been to develop a vibrant community garden in Iluka, which supplies fresh local organic food to the local branch of Meals on Wheels. The food is grown on the same site as it is cooked.

These pumpkins from the garden will go from spade to blade with the bare minimum of food kilometres and retain most of their nutrition before being consumed. Amazing stuff Linda!

The second, Rhoda Roberts, pictured here with her man Steve Field, we met up the main drag. Rhoda is a member of the Wiyebal Clan of Northern NSW, which is part of the Bundjalung Nation of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. She was the first Aboriginal presenter on prime-time television, fronting SBS's First In Line and presented Radio National's Awaye! programme. As an actor, she appeared on stage in the original production of Louis Nowra's Radiance, in a role written for her. She introduced the term "Welcome to country" and established protocol manuals by local custodians for the arts industry during the 1980s. She is currently head of Indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House, the creative director at VIBE Australia and director of a new Indigenous multi-arts event called the Boomerang Festival.

This is her ancestral country. So lovely to meet you Rhoda.

The third, Eddy Carroll, not a local but a friend from Melbourne currently staying in Yamba, caught the ferry over to visit us in Iluka. Eddy is a textile artist who has exhibited widely. She is a passionate advocate of local organic food networks and, like us, is currently living at no fixed address. Last year Eddy travelled to Thailand where she worked at Borderline Collective. Borderline Collective specialises in working with women in exile, developing their artistic skills in creating and marketing art work.

Eddy brought us over the gift of wild caught tuna jerky that she and a friend made with a local catch. Needless to say Artist as Family devoured it in moments. Thanks Eddy, great to see you again!

We will be leaving Iluka shortly to head to Bentley to join hundreds of kin fighting the gas-fracking juggernauts.

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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’.