Fruity Words: Windfall, Yield and Spoils

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Background Fruity Words: Windfall, Yield and Spoils is situated in the field of landscape and environment art with a focus on suburban food gardens. The work is informed by the writings on the Australian suburban ¼ acre block idyll by Peter Timms, Andrea Gaynor and Graeme Davison. Specifically, how domestic gardens signify ideology, enact class relationships, express dominance through ownership and control, and endorse the values of labour and leisure. While this critical discourse focuses on the self-determination of the homeowner how tenants engage the domestic garden and conflicts of power and values in this relationship relative to productive food gardening is not addressed by these writers. Contribution For the triptych Fruity words I created words out of fruit grown in my two concurrent gardens; a rental property (Yield and Spoils) and later, a privately owned residence (Windfall). These works question how anamorphic illusion and semantic slippages can probe social change evidenced by personal economics, sustainability and status as typified in the relationships between, for example, landlord/tenant/homeowner? The work employs post studio artistic gestures, created directly in gardens and often with materials at hand, to respond to the site histories and their current uses to critique past and contemporary domestic garden practices as a record of shifting social priorities. Through provisional staging and a deadpan 'one-liner' vernacular humour, the work explores contemporary and often conflicting cultural attitudes to the sustainability of home, house and garden. Significance The works was one of 33 finalists for the Incinerator Art Prize Art for Social Change exhibition from a field of over 330 applicants. The selection was peer reviewed by Max Delany (ACCA), Melissa Keys (Buxton Contemporary) and Mark Feary (Gertrude Contemporary) This is a high esteem nationally competitive prize that aligns my research with the themes of the environment and social change