[caption id="attachment_593" align="alignnone" width="300"] Chance sleep shelter, central NSW[/caption]

In 2009 Artist as Family transformed their household into a performance collective, attempting to model a frugal art practice that moves away from individualist thinking and making to generative, ecopoetical and communal expressions of art.

We recognise food is central to making culture; that food is the basis of life for all organisms and therefore how we produce it, obtain it and prepare it subsequently creates the intellectual fuel, or toxicity, of a culture. Our performances, therefore, involve procuring local, organic food outside of the monetary economy, and making this reality possible with our biophysical community in central Victoria as well as various communities online. It is only in recent times (the past several thousand years) that food has been put under lock-and-key, which aggregately has had disastrous affects on biospheres and their communities. This damage radically escalated over the past century through the mass-war-industry-ag sciences.

By incorporating gift-economy homemaking, permaculture principles and conservative peasant and indigenous food knowledges, Artist as Family’s practice radically composts ecologically destructive mantles of western culture.

Exhibitions include: This Is Not Art, Newcastle Lock-up Cultural Centre, (2009); In the balance: Art for a changing world, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); The Yeoman’s Project, Art Gallery of NSW (2013). Featured in the Thames and Hudson survey publication Art & Ecology Now (2014). Forthcoming publication The art of free travel, NewSouth Publishing (UNSW, 2015).