Back to our Roots: Art + Milkwood this Summer

This Summer it happens that we’re involved in not one but two fabulous art exhibitions in Sydney!

Namely The Yeoman’s Project at AGNSW and Yoko Ono’s WAR IS OVER (if you want it) at the MCA.  Come and visit us! 

The Yeomans Project is an exhibition by our awesome friends Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein, all about (sortof) the work of P.A. Yeomans, the founder of Keyine Farming.

In true style for these artists, The Yeomans Project (project website here) is an insightful, quirky, humorous and really very fascinating look at where regenerative agriculture intersects (or doesn’t) with Land Art.

And also about why, in the 1970’s, the AGNSW veto-ed at the last minute to stage a survey of P. A. Yeomans’s work (as proposed by Ian Milliss) as an alternative to Land Art, on the supposed grounds that it  would turn the Art Gallery into an agricultural tradeshow.

Ian and Lucas are beautifully fearless artists. You can tell by how they approach a project, piece by piece, discovery by discovery. With results like large format hand-made prints, bits of machinery, fascinating back-stories lovingly yet pragmatically told, and of course, conversations.

The conversations part is where we come in! Huzzah. I’ll be talking with Lucas at the AGNSW about how P.A.Yeomans’ work influenced our permaculture and art from a Milkwood perspective.

You can come along and heckle me if you like, it’s happening on the 4th December: 6pm at AGNSW, and it’s free.

There will also be conversations (on other nights) with folks like the amazing Stuart B Hill who is a walking Keyline compendium and Permaculture elder, so come along to that one too. Oh heck, come along to all 4 if you can. It will be great.

And then, if that’s not enough fun, we’re excited to be curating a series of Club Night workshops for Yoko Ono’s exhibition WAR IS OVER (if you want it) at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The workshops are FREE and will take place on the first 4 thursdays of January from 6pm till about 7.30pm. They’re happening on the sculpture terrace with it’s gob-smacking rooftop view across Sydney Harbour.

You can expect fun, hands-on workshops with a permaculture twist, as you sip an evening something and gaze across the harbour. While you listen intently, of course.

We’re especially tickled to be contributing to these exhibitions because this is (kindof) the world we left behind when we moved to Milkwood.

Before the great ruralisation of Nick and Kirsten six years ago, we were city dwellers and artists. And we spent our days seeing the city as both a canvass, and an organism to be fed, and danced with.

We built cardboard solar-powered planetariums in parks and laneways, threw projections off skyscrapers, and made our living by creating temporary spaces of light and dark and sound and cardboard, that transported people out of their everyday lives, even for just a moment.

I loved the city for what it was – a hulking, slow-breathing beast of light and stench and flesh and flowers and dark places and concrete walls and so many, many thoughts, all mangled and tangled together with wire and hair and smoke and grease.

Just as I love this farm and this land where we now live – a different organism, but one just as complex, and just as beautiful and tangled and hopeful and breathing.

Anyway. We love art. It’s poetry you can touch. It makes your brain work backwards and sideways, even while just looking at the ho-hum everyday.

We’d love to see you in Sydney this Summer.

And if you can’t make the above dates, check out the rest of these two fine exhibition’s programs! Much goodness there. Happy Summer all!