An amusing story has it that Ian Milliss met his now-wife, Wendy, because she was a keen art historian rummaging through the archives at Sydney University’s Power Institute. Wendy was researching the legacy of conceptual art in Australia, and found a few traces of this rather elusive character, who seemed to have disappeared from the […]
A lot of Yeomans’ criticisms of city design are based around the idea that we’ve lost our ability to “see” the landscape. (I’m still exploring ideas from his book The City Forest, 1971…) His argument is that a farmer living on an acreage for some time (if s/he is that way inclined) can get to […]
Yeomans’ Plows… Gotta love that slogan! A catalogue of options, in case you wanna buy one, is here. With any luck, we’ll be exhibiting one in the exhibition at ACCA in October! Continuing my harvest from Yeomans’ book The City Forest… I’m trying to get down some key ideas before their freshness runs away from […]
Continuing my exploration of the little green book… Yeomans’ proposition (to grow forests as intrinsic elements in urban design) is followed by a long middle section which is essentially pedagogical. I’ve not read Yeomans’ other books yet, but I am presuming that a lot of his teaching material in The City Forest is synthesised from […]
My last post didn’t really scratch the surface of Yeomans’ book The City Forest: The Keyline plan for the Human Environment Revolution. Instead I got caught up thinking about art. So I figured I’d return to this book a bit, and register some of my first impressions of it. Here they are: 1. The book […]
I reckon Ian’s broad definition of art is a useful provocation: 1. Art is action which changes the culture. 2. This action can be undertaken by anyone. When operating with a definition like this, it’s perhaps worth reiterating point 2: cultural change is not the sole domain of special professionals from the current narrowly-defined “artworld”. […]
Last Friday we descended into the bowels of the Art Gallery of NSW. Our mission? To dig up documents in an attempt to discover: a). if Ian really did propose an exhibition about Yeomans at AGNSW in the mid 1970s (ie, we’d like to know that he’s not hallucinating about all this history); b). that […]
Here’s a film from 1955 on Yeomans’ work in developing the Keyline farming system. It was made in 1955, and uploaded a year or so ago thanks to Darren Doherty, who runs workshops in contemporary keyline farm design: One of my favourite lines from the film is this: He’s ready with cold logic and forceful […]
The above video documents a community meeting up near Richmond, in north-west Sydney, a couple of years ago. The meeting was held to try and halt development on the piece of farmland that Yeomans had designed and set up with his trademark series of interlinking dams. Bob, the farmer we met yesterday, said that the […]
Today Ian and I embarked on our first adventure into Yeomans-land. I took the train to Penrith, where Ian picked me up in his macho ute (6 wheels!), and we headed north to Nevellan. We didn’t really know what we’d do when we got there – and in fact, we didn’t really end up […]
