Patrick Jones

Patrick Jones¿ work is a poethical redress of the economies of homeplace; a performing and refermenting of culture that is accountable to the resources and communities of life required to make it. This practice he calls permapoesis. His work, both written and biophysical, surveys Jones¿ familial and communal emplacing on old Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. It borrows from the economic 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 regenerated? Can it be a homeplace; a performance of everyday ecological functioning?Jones 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 2014 he was awarded a doctorate from Western Sydney University for his thesis Walking for food: reclaiming permapoesis. In that same year Artist as Family was featured in Art & Ecology Now (Thames and Hudson), a major survey of ecological art practices from around the world. In 2015 Jones co-authored with Meg Ulman the ecological travel memoir The Art of Free Travel (NewSouth), which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016, and in that same year Jones¿ work was critically referenced in Keywords for Environmental Studies (NYU Press). In 2017 his essay, ¿Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering earth¿ was published in Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis (Routledge). On social media Jones can be found positively @artistasfamily and critically @permapoesis.