Welcome to the School of Applied Neopeasantry
at Tree Elbow University.
Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr.
We live in Daylesford, Australia in Djaara Mother Country on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University. We practice a unique form of performance art, comprising how we live, get our food and medicine, and move around; performing modes of life making we call permacultural neopeasantry.
We teach a unique skill set of radical homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and online through our various videos, talks and blog posts.
We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, goatherders, gardeners and video makers who also make music, but mostly we’re a family who belong to a bloody great neighbourhood and community, and therefore we’re much more than the sum of our parts
Understanding the importance of relationships throughout our transition has been essential. Relationships with soil communities, with individual trees, with messenger birds, with clouds, with dog kin, goats, bees, microbes, with one another and with ourselves.
Our Latest Video
Highlights from the blog.
Preparing for the next fire season
As you may know we’ve been vlogging on our YouTube channel since COVID first pioneered Australia, and this winter we’ve been especially focussed on preparing for the next great challenge –this summer’s potential bushfire risk.
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Radicalising the home economy for greater adaptation and well-being
Hello Dear Reader, We’ve been incredibly busy with harvest season this year. It’s the first time in 12 years without volunteers helping to prepare and store food, fuel and medicine for the winter, exchanging their labour for learning, and helping us process the various abundances of this giving season.
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Replacing growth with belonging economies
Last year we were invited to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming book, Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices, to be published by Routledge later this year. Although, let’s not count on anything like that occurring.
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Collective preparedness
Back in 2018 Artist as Family was asked to be involved in an art event called Pandemic at Arts House in North Melbourne. The exhibition, coordinated by artists Lizzy Sampson & Asha Bee Abraham, was one of a number of Refuge events centred on where art meets emergency.
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