Artist as Family: The Bins Full

Friday 9 October 2009

The Bins Full

We were in the Newcastle Herald today! Here is the photo that accompanied the article:

After breakfast, we donned latex gloves and began the task of sorting our accumulated waste: recyclable, non-recyclable, and organic matter.

We had set aside the weekend to disassemble our collection, though in 6 hours we had finished; the bins full, the exercise yard swept clean.

It was Zeph's job to gather and flatten all the cans. So after lunch, he and Patrick biked the 4 kilograms of aluminium to Hunter Recyclers where Zeph received $5 for his efforts (with which he bought a block of dark chocolate he generously shared with us elders).

Meanwhile, Meg was kicking back at the Loft Youth Venue, not far from the Lock-Up, where she gave a blogging workshop to a great group of students.

If you live locally and were planning to come down to see our show over the weekend, we're sorry, but the show is no longer. But stay tuned to these www's, as our short film about our residency will be screening here shortly.

2 comments:

Glen Dunn10 October 2009 at 17:44
Hey Guys. It's been wonderful to garner a glimpse into your residency in gleaning… an inspirational project! Congrats to the AAF. Looking forward to the doco. Love.
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farmdoc11 October 2009 at 17:07
It's amazing how many people, with the name 'Ulman' in front of their eyes, write 'Ullman'. It happens to me all the time. xxx
PS I hope the blogging workshop went well, Meg. The attenders are lucky to have you as their teacher.
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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’.