Peachey & Mosig
are In Wild Air
Rachel Peachey and Paul Mosig have recently returned to their home in the Blue Mountains after a year and a half of living in Berlin. They make art together and more recently in collaboration with their two young boys, Sascha and Jack. Photography is the basis for most of their visual work, however they often use sculpture, installation and found objects as part of their process. They also run the design studio, Racket which undertakes graphic and web design projects.
Culture
Playing
We have spent many hours in playgrounds with our kids in the last few years, and the design trends tend to be pretty limited and cookie cutter in nature. There are always exceptions of course and during our time in Berlin and London we came across some fantastic artist designed and community led playgrounds. We would really love to make a playground with other artists and makers in the Blue Mountains community, a place where adults and children can engage in physical play with engaging and unexpected outcomes.
People
Listening
We all love music in our house and picking any type of favourite was an impossible kind of task, so in the end we settled on what we were listening to yesterday on our drive down the coast to Paul’s parents farm.
Quarter Turns Over A Living Line is the first LP of London duo Raime on the label Blackest Ever Black. A perfect soundtrack for our travelling and daydreaming, looking out as the storm clouds gather over the ocean and the world passes by. Also amazingly it always puts our kids to sleep, which is pretty sweet relief on a long drive.
Places
Walking
We were recently camping and hiking on the incredible Isle of Skye in Scotland and we came across the wonderful and slightly obsessive world of Munro bagging. A sub form of peak bagging, which is an activity in which walkers and mountaineers attempt to reach the summits of a collection of peaks, usually those above a certain height or in a particular region.
A Munro is a mountain in Scotland with a height over 3,000 feet and they are named after Sir Hugh Munro, who produced the first list of such hills, known as Munro's Tables, in 1891.
In a the Summer of 2011 a height survey by The Munro Society found that, Beinn a' Chlaidheimh, was actually only 2,998 feet 8 inches and thus short of the Munro mark. In September 2012, the Scottish Mountaineering Club demoted it from Munro to Corbett status (Scottish mountains between 2,500 and 3,000 feet high).
We were reading about Munro baging after spending days out walking in the kind of landscapes that make your humanity feel fleeting and inconsequential. On the one hand it all seems so ridiculous, demoting a mountain for not adhering to some kind of arbitrary criteria and yet this is what we do as humans. We tell ourselves stories that give us the drive to do all kinds of amazing things. These people are out there climbing in these spectacular places and if this is the kind of structure thats facilitates this then we love that.
Things
Eating
There has been a bounty of perfect avocados in the mountains this spring and we have been eating them for lunch pretty much every second day with a chilli and black bean dressing which is completely amazing and easy to make. The recipe is from Mike McEnearney, who is executive chef and owner of Kitchen by Mike and No.1 Bent St in Sydney.
We make a half recipe which lasts a couple of weeks and also finds itself onto roast veggies, salads and just over rice. We used to love visiting his abundant, over flowing canteen and were very happy when he released a cookbook. Our copy is now covered in all sorts of scribbly notes and stains which is testament to the fact that it well used and loved.
Thoughts
Sharing
Many of our rants about what ails Australia often end up with the increasingly clear fact that our private and commercial rent costs are too expensive for the majority. The consequence being that there is a lack of ongoing security and diminishing opportunities for risky, interesting and original enterprise.
This is particularly personal for me as a change in my housing situation in my teenage years really helped to support the life I am able to live today. From the ages of two till eleven I lived in housing commission flats with my Mum, who went through several periods of drug addiction and some particularly unhealthy relationships. This was not uncommon in the area and the neighbourhood was not particular safe, nor very inspiring. In 1989 with several other women my mum formed Juno Women’s Housing Association, a co-housing project for single mothers on low incomes.
Through their determination and with the help of the ACT government, seven purpose built co-located houses with communal gardens were developed and this is where I lived until I left home. When my mother moved to India for a few years I came back for university and lived in the house with my friends. The cost of housing was the sum of 25% of each persons income and this arrangement meant that I did not have to take on very much work and could concentrate on my studies. It also meant that there was no possibility of suddenly being evicted and that any choice to move on was entirely up to us.
Clearly it would be nice if those with the means to do so had some vision for how to build safe, creative, enduring communities. Waiting for this, however, seems like a fool's errand and perhaps organising people with similar needs and sharing resources and motivation is a surer bet.
This is particularly personal for me as a change in my housing situation in my teenage years really helped to support the life I am able to live today. From the ages of two till eleven I lived in housing commission flats with my Mum, who went through several periods of drug addiction and some particularly unhealthy relationships. This was not uncommon in the area and the neighbourhood was not particular safe, nor very inspiring. In 1989 with several other women my mum formed Juno Women’s Housing Association, a co-housing project for single mothers on low incomes.
Through their determination and with the help of the ACT government, seven purpose built co-located houses with communal gardens were developed and this is where I lived until I left home. When my mother moved to India for a few years I came back for university and lived in the house with my friends. The cost of housing was the sum of 25% of each persons income and this arrangement meant that I did not have to take on very much work and could concentrate on my studies. It also meant that there was no possibility of suddenly being evicted and that any choice to move on was entirely up to us.
Clearly it would be nice if those with the means to do so had some vision for how to build safe, creative, enduring communities. Waiting for this, however, seems like a fool's errand and perhaps organising people with similar needs and sharing resources and motivation is a surer bet.
Wildism
Reflecting
When we sit in the evening and watch the mist roll up the valley, we often imagine it as some type of being trying to communicate something with us that we can’t quite grasp. We are often drawn to human devices that reflect or process natural phenomenon. We are particularly drawn to the form of acoustic mirrors in particular. They were used in the Fist World War to reflect and concentrate sound waves before the invention of the radar to detect enemy aircraft. Many of these acoustic mirrors remain and it would be amazing to stumble across one without context as they are beautiful sculptures in their own right.