is one-fifth of the performance collective Artist as Family. In 2010 Artist as Family was commissioned to produce Food Forest, as part of the exhibition In the balance: Art for a changing world at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. In 2011 Jones was awarded runnerup in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize For New and Emerging Poets for his poem “Step by step”, which was recorded by Radio National’s Permeate series in 2012. In 2014 he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Western Sydney for his thesis Walking for food: reclaiming permapoesis. Also in that year Artist as Family was featured in Art & Ecology Now (Thames and Hudson). In 2015 Jones co-authored with his partner Meg Ulman the ecological travel memoir The Art of Free Travel (NewSouth), which was shortlisted for an ABIA award in 2016. Also in 2016 Jones’ work was mentioned in Keywords for Environmental Studies (NYU Press).
Research Practice
Patrick Jones’ work is a poethical redress of the economies of homeplace; a performing of culture that is accountable to the resources and communities of life required to make it. This practice he calls permapoesis. His work surveys his familial and communal emplacing on old Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. It borrows from the lifeways of Aboriginal people and enacts modes of lifemaking akin to his own indigenous and peasant ancestries. Jones’ practice calls into question what is art, where does it reside, who is it for, and what communities does it belong to or stand upon? Can art, Jones’s practice investigates, be a thing lived? Can it be a resource? Can it be a homeplace; a performance of everyday ecological functioning?
Website
http://permapoesis.blogspot.com.au
http://theartistasfamily.blogspot.com.au
Some Publications
Literary Stiles and Symbolic Culture, 2014.
At close quarters: Re-encountering the sensible, 2013.
Photo credit: Nicholas Walton-Healey