Buster Simpson Treehouse

A school for artists and a big place where everyone can experience and build with his/her ow creativity and of course the result is a treehouse!

It was the 1972 when the artist Buster Simpson was the Co-Director at the Pilchuck Glass School  and they built a treehouse.

The approach to nature and the urban environment it’s something strong in his art. The Chinese curator and critic Carol Yinghua Lu of the exhibition “Surveyor” about Buster Simpson at the Frye Art Museum wrote about him:

” One of the burning questions for me in examining your work is how the change of context affects your thinking about and relating to an environment in your artistic practice. You have talked about your shift from a return-to-nature approach to a focus on the urban environment; you have described your experience of being at Woodstock and have said that Pilchuck at its founding was “a bunch of hippies on a tree farm” and “utopian.” You became interested in “bringing the ethos of nature into the city and finding some discussion between the systems we see in nature and the systems of the city.” This direction led to many interventional projects and public commissions, which often took the form of collaboration with different partners in terms of work and engagement and interaction with the physical and political infrastructure of the city. Is such a shift aesthetic in nature?” Carol Yinghua Lu in catalogue of the exhibition “Surveyor”.

Moreover we can find his passion about the trees also in 1979, when he and other “artists associated with Urban Arboretum failed to save a sixty-year-old Queen Anne fruiting cherry tree on the site of what was to become the first condo development in the area. Even Simpson’s occupation of the tree in The Crow’s Nest, a platform fashioned from rebar and other building materials, proved unsuccessful. Undaunted and committed to redoubling his efforts, Simpson lovingly carved a ladder from that original “witness to history” so that he could climb the next tree in need of preservation. As seen in the related photomontage, when a new fruiting cherry was planted nearby, the artists made sure to tell the story and safeguard the new sapling with protective guards made from the original tree’s limbs“. Catalogue of the exhibition “Surveyor”

Pic by Catalogue of the exhibition “Surveyor“. All rights reserved.