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b-home Build and Matt Bua:

inspired and repurposed

systems for creating a more empowering world

Welcome to my world at b-home build. I’m Matt Bua, artist and intuitive builder. My studio has slowly become a sculpture park experience called b-home and I’ve just now begun a new, small, company called b-home Build which is designed to help support my work at the art park and beyond. I’m in love with everything about the natural world. What is the splendor and bounty that She provides? How do we recreate with Her? What is the trick of intuitively putting the debris of our modern civilization to use, finally, after all these ages of destruction? How can we begin solving our problems in the most efficient and harmonic way? These are the questions that act as my compass. It is these issues that are of prime importance to me and are my highest aspirations.

- Matt Bua, Artist/Owner, b-home Build

“Come walk with me, and I will tell
what I have read in this scroll of stone;
I will spell out this writing on hill and meadow.
This is New England's entablature of rock,
leagues upon leagues of sealed history awaiting an interpreter…

From "The Song of the Stone Wall"  -By Helen Keller

And let’s not forget 11 generations back- we are all related- and 33 generations back we all share a mother. Anything that divides is a Big Lie! Let’s keep us AlL WHOLE!

Talking Walls- published 2015. by Publication Studio Hudson will be 10 years old this year! “These are the ‘Walls’ we are looking for!” Book review Here

latest b-Home news… ARTNET, The NY Post, WNYC’s Gothamist, CNBC ‘Make’, Porcupine Soup, And Syracuse.com

Headboards and bedside tables built at Glen Falls House

• Matt Bua works with Jon Picco and crew to redesign the most nature loving, elegant and inspiring get away in the Catskills.

• Matt Bua and wife Cassidy Bua ( Cassidy A. Maze, pen name/ stage name) launch their next creative campaign, The Catskills Flight Trail with inspiring and authentic independent artist and business partners across Greene County. Read More ….

2011 Catskill Business and Community Directory —Feline Novelty Architecture aka a “FOLLY”

Farm Stand, Home Kiosk In Progress2.jpg

Farm Stand in-progress Day 1

Last Day at the Catamount People’s Museum-2017 photo by Alex Perry

Last Day at the Catamount People’s Museum-2017 photo by Alex Perry

Matt Bua makes small scale improvised buildings, hand-built people's museums and roadside attractions.

His recent work takes the form of mystical spaces that redefine and re-imagine found objects - and sustainable resources - as functional elements in his building process.

Over the last ten years, Bua has created multiple public spaces in his home town of Catskill, NY - including the Catamount Peoples’ Museum, the WGXC Studio in the Catskill Community Center, The Young Peoples’ Museum, the Open-Air Classroom, the Art of Play- Play Space, The Awakened Rip Sculpture, and the Camp Now Holiday Pop-Up.

In addition, he has been hard at work creating a fantastical sculpture park in the woods. Bua’s mythical repurposed city, b-home, is a collaborative construction of small scale vernacular, experimental, and visionary architecture samples located on a piece of land in Catskill, NY. This large span of work is an art studio with a sculpture park. It contains lithic remains from cultures of the past and, at the heart of the wooded world, stands strong, a hand built cabin in which Bua lived as he came to write the ground breaking book “Talking Walls: Casting Out the Post-Contact Stone-Wall-Building Myth.

Lower Case ‘a’-Frame at b-home 2007

Lower Case ‘a’-Frame at b-home 2007

After almost 20 years, this work – forever a work in progress -b-home is being prepared for it’s next steward. To someone ready to continue the art of intuitive building while also keeping the conversations going with the ancient indigenous stone work.

“What if all potential building materials discarded in the trash could be utilized for the creation of new public spaces? What if a person’s personal collection, that accumulation of stuff that is so often hidden away, could be brought out into the open, displayed and viewed by others for the first time? People work too hard to obtain and maintain their super-sized lifestyles, while the really precious things in their lives are too often forgotten. It is that stuff — having grown old and having become clutter—that needs to be recycled into something new, something revealed, something useful. From that purged material may be built a structure that serves as both portraiture and shelter” -m.b.

b-home- History and Future in ArtNet article by Sarah Cascone- Photo by Ted Degener

The Well Well Welles House (All things H,G. Wells, Orson Welles, and George Orwell) Made with 3 giant W’s and a wishing well in the middle… At the Franconia Sculpture park in Minnesota

The Well Well Welles House (All things H,G. Wells, Orson Welles, and George Orwell) Made with 3 giant W’s and a wishing well in the middle… At the Franconia Sculpture park in Minnesota

 

Cribs To Cribbage-(Exterior Shot) Mass MoCA 2009 Map of Show and Guide“Cribs to Cribbage is a kind of spatial escape act: The crib has become alive and is climbing out a nearby window… The dinosaur spine-like spaces created by this apparent sentient…

Cribs To Cribbage-(Exterior Shot) Mass MoCA 2009 . Get the Map of Show and Guide

“Cribs to Cribbage is a kind of spatial escape act: The crib has become alive and is climbing out a nearby window… The dinosaur spine-like spaces created by this apparent sentient crib-structure- it’s Lebbeus Woods meets Lincoln Logs by way of vertebrate biology- would seem rather nightmarish from a child’s perspective, I’d imagine, but there’s also a spatial honesty to that.” Geoff Manaugh- BLDG BLOG

“Matt Bua’s ‘Architectural Cribbage’ amounts to a platform for empowering people to define their own architectural surroundings, free from the normalizing strictures of building code.” Brian Zeeger -Time Out New York

“Cribs to Cribbage is a play on architectural ideas, a commentary on collecting, and a never-quite-grew-up kid's ebullient spewing of undigested detritus into a grand, half-assed construction that meanders all over creation and offers lots of little discoveries along the way. As a whole, it's a mess that all children will love.But it's also for adults, and that's part of the message” David Brickman ‘Get Visual

Prankster People’s Museum at the Prattsville Art Center (2018- ) photo credit: Nancy Barton

Prankster People’s Museum at the Prattsville Art Center (2018- ) photo credit: Nancy Barton

These shirts are available at Citiot - Glen Falls House and the Prattsville Art Center—— Thank you Upstate Ink for making them!