Artist as Family: October 2018

Tuesday, 9 October 2018

New podcast! House + garden tours! New PLC dates! And a very special forthcoming event!

Well, it's been three weeks since our sweet divorce from social media and we've been breathing more deeply by not serving the algorithm. We are exceedingly more productive, co-organising a significant new community speaking event, tending, gathering and making returns within our food and energy biomes, and teaching our first Permaculture Living Course (PLC).

Teeka, Marty and Cara are our first three PLC students

PLCs aim to transform permaculture principles and ethics into truly living the change – living alternative economies, practicing social-permaculture, fermenting and composting incalculable things to extend life and honour death, caring for kin, community and more-than-humans, developing post-materialist/capitalist lifeways, growing and harvesting home and community food and energy resources, making biomic returns (humanure, potash, micturated biochar, weed and poultry teas etc), and guerilla-managing public lands using regenerative land practices. Song-, philosophy- and poem-making also feature big throughout the day's labours, coupling the pragmatic with the soulful, the earthly with the abstract. Our PLCs are 100% non-monetary and 100% non-accredited.

Apply. Our next round of applications to do a Permaculture Living Course are open. Head here for more info about what's involved. Please email us if you'd like an application form. Applications close Friday November 23. The three autumn 2019 PLC dates are:

Dates.
Feb 25 - March 10
April 1 - 14
April 29 - May 12

Gift. We're looking for those who are not only committed to transforming their home economy into a carbon-conscious social ecology, but those already engaged in such work within the community (by which we mean non-monetary) economies.

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Tours. Our house and garden tours have begun again and you can book for a tour here. There are two more tours this year.

Podcast tour. If you can't make it to an actual tour you can listen to our latest podcast, Radical neopeasant homemaking, which was recorded a few weeks ago, captured on our last tour:

We hope this gives you a little insight into some of the processes, systems and biomes we labour with and within.

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Event. With our community caps on we have been working hard with Eva Perroni to put together this special event, which takes place in our home town of Daylesford in less than two weeks:

Land for Life. Featuring Jaara speaker Rebecca Phillips, permaculture co-originator David Holmgren and US food activist-scholar, Eric Holt Giménez, this event will be the second in a series of talks, since we co-produced Land Cultures: Aboriginal economies and permaculture futures (2016) with Anthony Petrucci.

Note. If you'd like more info about Land for Life, please email us (click above right) or head over here.

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Another thing. If you are reading this in your inbox, some of our media will not appear. You may have to click through to our blog to read the post in full.

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Thanks. Thank you for reading and engaging with our labours in our little neck of the world,
Artist as Family.

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’.