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Art, Land, and Play
Written By: Billy Love, The Bascom | Issue: December 2023
There’s an undeniable playfulness at the heart of Walker Tufts’ enigmatic works.
Walker Tufts, The Bascom’s Winter Resident Artist, makes work that he describes as “games and objects that examine human and more-than-human relationships, especially as they relate to dirt and land.”
Tufts’ work engages the viewer by presenting a mash-up of games and objects that embody the play of folk games combined with experimental and improvisational rule sets. Tufts’ objects playfully frame existing rules and natural systems to concretely situate simple human actions in webs of responsibility and larger ecologies. We invite audiences to engage with Walker Tufts’ site-specific installation when the exhibit opens this winter on January 13.
Tufts will share with his audience an investigation of an ongoing project, Satellites & Salamanders. Through sculptures, films, and games, Satellites & Salamanders attempts to re-member hidden and lost parts of Tufts’ legacies. The installation orbits around a pair of 1:1 scale models of NASA satellites that become an escape-pod/tiny house, a climbing wall, a vertical forest, and more. Tufts states: the project “is an anti-self-portrait, that works to capture and contain, instead of reinforce certain aspects of my legacies.”
Walker Tufts is an artist and educator currently based in Buffalo, New York, but who has strong connections with the South and spent six weeks in the fall of 2023 as an artist in residence at LivLab in Sylva, in partnership with Western Carolina University. Tufts received his MA in Studio Art from James Madison University and recently, his MFA in Emerging Practices from the University of Buffalo in 2023.
The Bascom Winter Resident Artist Program, better known as the W.R.A.P., calls on Students or Faculty from the surrounding universities to submit site-specific installation proposals for The Bascom’s unique and beautiful Thompson Gallery. Students and faculty from across the southeast apply for this unique and challenging opportunity to live and work on The Bascom campus to design, build, and install their project proposal in only four weeks.
The W.R.A.P. is designed to accommodate the Winter Break schedules of artists enrolled in degree programs or Higher Education instruction. Students and faculty from across the southeast apply for this unique and challenging opportunity to live and work on The Bascom campus to design, build, and install their project proposal in only four weeks.
