We're all on 'work experience' thanks to Liam

We have just completed a week of work experience thanks to Liam Scott, a student from the local high school. Liam undertook to hang with us and see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what 'work' constitutes, according to us. One of the things we did during the week was to measure up and draw a first draft design for the proposed permanent Daylesford Community Food Garden. Here's a short vid that snapshots the adventure.

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Primitive poetics

On Saturday a few of us adults took 12 boys on a bush adventure for Zeph's birthday. We walked for two and a half hours, stopping to make, observe or find things to collect. One of the activities they were assigned was to collectively build a shelter in ten minutes. The first peg shows the result. At the end of the walk we came across the remnants of a large forest installation I made between 2000 and 2005, where boardwalks and wallaby grass tracks led you through a series of environments subtly altered as physical or biophysical poems.

The type of sedge grass in this forest is the oldest locally living flora. Their origins predate eucalypt forests and are supposedly as ancient as the dinosaurs.

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Greenwash #9 in Trouble - Uncapitalised Fruit

Have you ever wondered why public parks (with few exceptions) are not filled with fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs? Or why schools don’t teach children about local ecology and Indigenous food plants? Well that would be sending the wrong message: That people could forage at their leisure for their own resources.

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The work just installed, 1999.

Zephyr practicing parkour on the library wall, 2010.

Giving a Fuji a light late-summer prune, 2010.

Showing Zeph the ropes for maintaining the poems, 2010.

This work also derives from childhood memories of walking home from school with my older brother, picking apples and plums on the 'nature strips' as we went.

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