Artist as Family: April 2015

Saturday, 18 April 2015

More on walked-for food

This is today's lunch table after the foraging walk and before we all hoed in.

Come join Artist as Family for Saturday lunch (by donation) or both the foraging workshop and lunch ($45 pp). Can you guess the mystery dish? Free lunch for the first person to correctly guess two of the ingredients in this spread.

Saturday, 11 April 2015

Workshops in walked-for food

Patrick is taking small groups out every Saturday morning in Daylesford to teach the art of finding free food.

Between 20 and 30 species is typically what's found. These will revolutionise your kitchen and add richly to your preventative medicine cabinet. Patrick teaches you how, what and where to forage.

After a two-hour walk join Artist as Family for a light locavore lunch including a foraged salad from the walk, Meg's ferments and pickles, Patrick's slow-fermented spelt sourdough, produce from our garden, bush tucker, teas, weed juices and more.

This is the table after our 9 delightful guests left today.

Today's lunch—with everything made at home—included slow-juiced apples, spelt sourdough, a raw milk fresh cheese, a pesto of kale, almond and oregano, pickled butter beans, pickled beetroot, fermented sprouts, olives, sauerkraut, carrot pulp, rosemary and flaxseed crackers, semi-dried tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, dried nashi pears, and a salad of dandelion, mallow, wild fennel, sheep's sorrel, wild mustard, sow thistle, vetch, calendula and borage flowers.

Meg will be taking fermenting workshops shortly, so stay tuned for these forthcoming bubbling sessions.

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’.