Artlink ART LAND

This week the new edition of Artlink Magazine, themed ART LAND was launched.

It contains a discussion between KSCA member Lucas Ihlein and LATITUDES, a Barcelona curatorial collective (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna), who are well known for the wonderful book LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, and many more things besides.

The discussion took place in June-July 2016, in the lead up to Lucas' first long period in residence in Mackay for Sugar vs the Reef. Read the discussion online here.

The article also touches on the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation's HEMP INITIATIVE, which KSCA member Gilbert Grace is working on with farmer Stuart Andrews.

PLUS! -- it's a bumper edition for regional and land art issues - with an essay by another KSCA member Ann Finegan, entitled Solastalgia and its cure.

You can buy the magazine here.

Planning the Hemp Initiative at Marloo

This was KSCA’s second visit to Marloo, the 1700 acre property of Stuart and Megan Andrews. While the first was a sunny affair, this was a day of rain, low-lying fog and soggy socks. And one or two silly hats. OK maybe just one.

Does she know she's wearing a silly hat?

Gilbert, Alex, Diego, Laura, Ann, Georgie and Emma made it a short distance in our ‘toy vehicles’ as Stuart called them. We parked at the top of the track and proceeded on foot before we all climbed aboard the 4WD ute to the site of The Hemp Initiative. This was extra fun for those of us riding in the tray.

Along with Stuart we met Manawa, who is one of two Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) trainees working on Marloo. Manawa had previously been a miner in Queensland and had decided a couple of years back that he wanted to work with the land in a different way.

Stuart showing us his site for the hemp crop, at the base of an eroded hillside.

This will be part of the Marloo tour we're organising for Futurelands 2 in November, when we’ll bus people to the farm for a picnic lunch and an exclusive NSF demo with Stuart.

Diego and Georgie surveyed the landscape for some wild edibles. Diego was scoping for ingredients that might make their way into the Foragers Feast dinner, another highlight of Futurelands 2 in November.

Emma provided on-site feedback for possible NSF school workshops.

The ever-patient Stuart and Manawa did a stellar job of explaining the combination of factors that caused the damage. Soggy socks aside, the rainy conditions were helpful here – water behaves the same under gravity no matter what the scale.

We took a close look (Gilbert took an immersive look) at the rutted gullies and could see clearly the way the water run-off was stripping the hillside of topsoil and creating deep furrows, exposing layers of clay. The clay and topsoil – the health and vitality of the farm – was being deposited at the base of the hill.

One of the strategies of NSF is to slow the flow of water down hillsides, which on over-stocked and eroded land carries away nutrients and top-soil. On this hillside, Stuart will be creating contours across this slope. These contours are designed to distribute water and nutrients to the ridge-line. As Manawa explained, they are a way of emulating a natural phenomenon, a bit like when rain on freshly mowed grass pushes clippings into little furrows that then distributes water across many channels. The challenge is to avoid disturbing the sub-soil (which is a conduit for water flowing down the hill), and to encourage vegetation.

This is the eroded hillside we were looking at.

And here's an image of another hillside on Marloo where the contouring system has recently been applied.

As Stuart described, this requires some serious ‘earthworks’ – a word that makes it easy to draw the link between the agricultural innovator and artist, as KSCA members Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein did through the Yeomans Project.

To prepare for the hemp crop, Stuart had ripped the soil and sown a cover of green manure.

Some fresh scat detective work told us that rabbits, kangaroos and the neighbour’s sheep had made the most of the fresh pick. Poo is of course an essential part of the biological process in which all organic material is the result of and contributes to life, but we observed that the hemp crop that is to follow will need serious protection from these foragers if it is to grow tall enough to harvest!

When that hemp is eventually harvested, it will be deposited on the contoured slope as mulch. This will prevent the surface layer from drying out further, and allow the biological components of the decomposing mulch to revive the soils. The hemp fibre will also act like a weed mat that stabilises the hillside.

The hemp crop is as much an agricultural experiment for Stuart as it is a cultural experiment for Gilbert and the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. This is why we’re pretty excited about The Hemp Initiative: it feels like a genuine art/agriculture collaboration. For Stuart the primary aim is to find out whether hemp can be incorporated into NSF methods: he is continuing to develop the fine-grain applications of NSF, using Marloo a site for research and training.

Alongside this practice is the more culturally focused practice of Gilbert and the rest of us, who know that practical knowledge gives us a different kind of stake in the debates we often take part in around land use and climate change. Non-THC hemp (the kind you can’t smoke) is a genuine superfood for humans and the earth. But it can’t work its carbon-sequestering, nutritious, biodegradable magic if the misinformation and commercial sabotage that surrounds it continues. Australia has been particularly backward on this front.

Here’s a map showing the countries in red where low-THC hemp is NOT legal for human consumption, courtesy www.hempfoods.com.au/australian-hemp-legislation

Communicating the versatility of hemp through art is a great exercise in focusing attention on the culture in agri-culture. The project says a lot about the ethos of cultural adaptation that underpins KSCA and also expands upon an aspect of Gilbert’s city-based practice: the phenomenology of human-landscape interactions.

Back at the house we were warmly welcomed by Megan Andrews, and got cosy over tasty scones, cream, jam and tea. We chatted about another hemp champion who’d recently visited the area: Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham. Buckingham is currently spearheading a rethinking of hemp prohibition legislation. In February the NSW upper-house voted, by a narrow margin (with Christian Democrat support), to lift the ban on hemp. This follows from NSW Premier Mike Baird’s recent decision to legalise medical marijuana trials.

It all feels very timely…

Gilbert Grace and Laura Fisher blogging for KSCA.

First Meeting – The Hemp Initiative at Marloo

In April this year KSCA's first project got off the ground when several of us visited Marloo, a property owned by Stuart Andrews that will be the site of KSCA's landed art residency. Stuart’s father Peter pioneering Natural Sequence Farming at the famous Tarwyn Park, a system of agriculture and hydrology that involves generating soil and using weeds to hold water and drought-proof the land. Natural Sequence Farming is a significant Australian agricultural innovation that has done much to shift thinking around land stewardship, even if the wider farming community has been slow to embrace its principles. Stuart is carrying on his father’s work, restoring the highly degraded Marloo using and developing his father’s techniques.

Over the next year, Gilbert Grace will be growing a crop of non-THC hemp at Marloo, working closely with Stuart (who is already using "repair plants" to regenerate the property's soils) and hemp entrepreneur Klara Marosszeky of the Australian Hemp Masonry Company. Hemp is a miracle plant with countless applications across many industries, including construction, agriculture, textiles, food and manufacturing, yet it is highly regulated and totally misunderstood. Grace's land art residency is all about showcasing hemp's remarkable properties as a sustainable material, and suggesting a technology that could replace the cement manufacturing that until recently was the dominant industry in Kandos.

Gilbert, Diego, Alex, Ann and some other curious types arrived about 4 pm in three vehicles and met with Stuart, Megan and Manou. Gilbert wrote this account:

Stuart gave us a tour of Marloo through some fairly steep sections of trail.

The first gully was an appropriate demonstration of Stuart’s remediation of a watercourse to restore the creeks ‘meander’, slow the flow of water and rapid loss of nutrients, building steps in the eroded banks and installing banks at places where he had identified black silt evidence of previous wetland accumulations. He is in fact attempting to restore many of the natural features beginning with water storage and nutrient loss.

He is encouraging a range of plants back into the ecology, many of which are also self seeding.

This pond was filled with cumbungi Stuart had planted. It was now appearing up and down the watercourse.

Further on another more open slope he describe the creation of steps in the hillside and how it is meant to decrease the loss of water and nutrients. Also Stuart described how the more degraded soil becomes, the more spiky and forbidding are the plants that grow on it.

We made our way back up the slope to the top of the ridge line and to view the sites that Stuart had selected for the field trials of the hemp. There is a primary site that would be more suitable for Stuart’s purposes of soil remediation and a back up site that having already been worked might supply some hemp to work with for Cementa.

Mount Marsden in the background, named for the flogging parson.

The first trial site is to the right of the photo, on the more level land beneath the striated hillside. The soil on the site has been ripped to allow moisture to penetrate. Stuart will shortly rip the eroded hillside and plough in some stepped tiers to prevent water from washing down the hill during a rain event. He is very specific about the depth to which the channel can be plowed, only to the top part of the upper layer of top soil. Beneath is clay soils that he does not want to flood with water as it diminishes soil fertility and increases threat of soil slippage.

In the end we made our way back to the house and continued the conversation that went on seemingly for an hour or more. I had some printed information about my project that was shared around, images of bamboo bikes – held together with hemp cord, the justification for growing the crop. With other images and files about the many uses of agricultural hemp.

After we said our goodbyes and we drove off back to Kandos Projects for a well earned beer and pizza.

'Ecologies of Land and Sea': Sydney Environment Institute

KSCA member Laura Fisher will be participating in the upcoming colloquium 'Art, Science, Oceans' which is being convened by the Space, Place and Country research cluster at Sydney College of the Arts in association with Sydney Environment Institute.

Friday 12 August, 2016

http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/events/arts-science-oceans/

The day brings together scientific, humanist and artistic scholars from The University of Sydney and Vanderbilt University to discuss the human impact on the planet’s marine realm and the significance of the ocean to contemporary research, writing and artistic practice. The Great Barrier Reef will be a focus of the day, and installation artist Janet Laurence will speak about Deep Breathing-Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), her acclaimed work created in response to the beauty but also the degradation of the Reef through ocean warming and acidification.

Laura will be speaking about Sugar vs the Reef, a collaborative project involving artists Lucas Ihlein, Ian Milliss (also KSCA members) and Kim Williams. The project is taking place in Mackay, Queensland, where the chemical run-off from sugar cane farming is a major cause of damage to the Great Barrier Reef.  Sugar vs the Reef is a continuation of The Yeomans Project, which examined the legacy of Australian farming innovator P. A. Yeomans through the very suggestive trope of “the farmer as artist”. Ihlein and Milliss described the latter project as ‘an opportunity to look at art as an entirely utilitarian enterprise – one that proposes new, creative and sustainable ways of working with land’.

Sugar vs the Reef is a socially engaged art project that makes farming, scientific, activist and artistic domains permeable to each other. Laura's been thinking a lot about permeability as both an artistic strategy and an environmental problem, and will try to speak coherently about those ideas. She'll also share what she's learnt about the differing viewpoints on art, agriculture and the reef that participants are bringing to the project.

Postscript:

The Sydney Environment Institute published a blog post written by SCA's Ann Elias about the day here.

TALKING ABOUT RICE WHILE EATING RICE

KSCA member Dr Lucas Ihlein is hosting this event in Sydney, on Thursday 11 August from 6.00PM – 7.30PM
Free - (Bookings).

Details:
Join us for an evening with this most ubiquitous of grains.

Building on his recent visit to a rice farming enterprise in Guangdong province, Lucas Ihlein hosts a conversation with artist Vic McEwan, recipient of the Arts NSW Regional Fellowship 2014-15 (NarranderaNSW), and rice farmer Tim Randall (Griffith NSW).

What social, environmental and economic factors affect rice farming communities in Australia and China today?

The image above shows Linda Tan from Rice Harmony, in her rice paddy, Guangdong, China.

Several varieties of Randall Organic Rice will be sampled on the night!

This 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art public program is a co-production with the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) and the Material Ecologies Research Network (MECO) at University of Wollongong.

Presented as part of Sea Pearl White Cloud 海珠白雲, an exhibition of new work by Lucas Ihlein and Trevor Yeung, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society, Gaunzghou, and supported by the City of Sydney.

EVENT PAGE:
http://www.4a.com.au/talking-about-rice-while-eating-rice/

FUTURELANDS 2

We are excited to announce that KSCA is working with the Space, Place and Country research cluster from Sydney College of the Arts,  Cementa Inc. and Material Ecologies Research Network (MECO) at University of Wollongong, to stage Futurelands II, a public forum in Kandos, NSW, November 11 to 13, 2016.

The weekend will bring together artists, writers, agricultural innovators, ecological scientists, environmental activists, Indigenous custodians and the broader community to explore our changing relationship to land and the emerging art forms that are engaging with it. Among the confirmed speakers is Bunarong, Tasmanian and Yuin man, Bruce Pascoe, whose historical account of pre-contact Indigenous farming practices and aquaculture, Dark Emu, was recently awarded NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Book of the Year.

Futurelands II will also mark the establishment of the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), a collaboration between Alex Wisser, Ian Milliss, Ann Finnegan, Lucas Ihlein, Diego Bonetto, Gilbert Grace and Laura Fisher. Having recently been awarded an Australia Council grant, KSCA’s first project will be a landed artists’ residency that grants artists who work with ecological phenomena and agricultural innovation access to land to make long term projects.

Gilbert Grace (SCA MFA) will be resident artist at Marloo in 2016/2017, a farm that is currently being rehabilitated by farmer and educator, Stuart Andrews, using the Natural Sequence Farming method developed by his father Peter Andrews. Grace will be growing a crop of hemp for the production of hempcrete, an alternative to concrete, formerly the key industry of Kandos.

Information about KSCA and Futurelands II will be updated on http://cementa.com.au/ and http://ksca.land/.

If you are interested in attending Futurelands II or want further information, please write to info@ksca.land.