Pickles & Concrete by Walker Tufts and Greg Stewart
Pickles & Concrete is a time-negotiating kitchen laboratory where visitors use bacteria to make pickles, grow and test bioconcrete, and preserve food. The project contrasts two human attempts to alter the flow of time, freezing, dehydrating, and pickling to remove food from its usual cycle of decay and the freezing and thawing of concrete to rapidly simulate the passage of entire seasons. Pickles & Concrete invites players to get tangled up in the time scales between food preservation, building materials, bacteria and geology in an attempt to re-story science.
Artist Walker Tufts says, “I’m excited to bring bioart and the ways it can help us imagine a more playful, inclusive science to a broad audience through a collaboration with CEPA Gallery.”
Walker Tufts is an artist and game designer whose work explores our relationship to others (both human and more-than-human). He is a graduate of the SUNY at Buffalo MFA program and has had experience in creating commissioned works in Wales, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and the United States. He is currently a resident at the Coalesce Center for Biological Art, where he makes pickles and bioconcrete.
Pickles & Concrete wants your pickles & ferments! We’re accepting recipes, stories, suggestions, and fantasies as well as starters & more. If it’s fermented and you want to share it with us, we’re interested. Get in touch with us at walker@cepagallery.org
Pickles & Concrete is an ongoing experiment between the kitchen and the laboratory and will take form as an exhibition at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY in August. Pickles & Concrete contrasts two human attempts to alter the flow of time. In the kitchen we freeze, dehydrate and pickle foods to remove them from air time, the airborne environmental microbiome and cycle of decay. In contrast, we freeze and thaw concrete to simulate the passage of entire seasons in a single day. Pickles & Concrete invites players to get tangled up in the time scales between food preservation, building materials, bacteria and geology in an attempt to re-story time & science.