Greenwash #11 in Trouble - a poethics of foraging

For a few years now I’ve been interested in how permaculture, and its siblings – biodynamic and natural farming – can inform an arts practice. In other words, how an arts practice can follow suit in the way in which it produces things, biomimicking natural systems and therefore having something to return to the land it has taken from. More recently I’ve been thinking about foraging as another such activity that can inform art and help move it on from an industry embedded in capitalist structures. An ethic of foraging attends directly to the reclamation of public food lands and to the reclamation of a ‘collective wealth’. Read on here.

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See also: collectivewealth.org

Image: (detail) Feral Fruit Map, Google map collaboration (as initiated by Axel White), Melbourne, 2010 onwards. To participate contact: axelinaustralia@yahoo.com

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Greenwash #10 in Trouble - Art, Abstraction and Animal Cruelty

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Greenwash #4 in Trouble

Glen Dunn recently made a short film about a kiln firing in Southern Tasmania, posted it online and found an unexpected viral enthusiasm for it around the globe. The film’s fusing of the ancient and the modern, the physical and the digital, taps into some of our most basic inclinations to form meaning of the present with things and activities that are common to the past. Things such as clay and wood and fire.

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Greenwash #3 in Trouble

Waste. No other single word defines our civilisation better. Ninety years of crude oil extraction, refinement and burning has turned the planet and its atmosphere into a monumental toxicological dump. But the rapid exploitation of oil deposits is only one corollary of our anti-ecological state, our mindset for waste has been gradually developing over 6,000 years.

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Greenwash #2 in Trouble

A few years ago I met and shared a meal with John Peterson, a US artist-farmer who worked out a unique way to put the mardi gras back into microbial life. Peterson has spent a lifetime building interrelationships between the earth, art and food. He transformed his family’s farm from using conventional ecocidal farming practices into a world of creativity and experimentation where wild nature was encouraged to coexist with cultivated nature.

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Greenwash #1 in Trouble

As this is the first in a series of columns on art and the environment, I thought I’d begin with my own definition of the much bandied about word ‘sustainability’, and talk about how my thoughts and understanding of ecology have radically changed my own art practice over the years.

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