ARTTYCO TALKS
James invites us to walk the line between visibility and sensation—where light, atmosphere, and elemental forces shape ephemeral pathways through space and perception.
ARTTYCO TALKS | October 13, 2025.
EPISODE #15: JAMES TAPSCOTT
1. Your installations are deeply influenced by elements like wind, light, and water—sometimes even becoming co-creators. How do you decide when to step back and let nature take control, and when to intervene?
J: There’s a point on every project – especially when I’m focusing on the elements you mentioned, where the site gets to have its say. Ideally it begins at the time of a site visit, when the project is still in the very early stages of conception, and can inform the design process from there. Learning the nuances of site phenomena can help select materials and figure out the best way to let people experience it.
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Many of my works feel like instruments, for the site to play. Thinking of how every musical instrument has been designed to be played by a certain part of the human body (mouth, fingers etc) and so then my apparatus is designed to work with the site, be it through wind / water currents or light conditions. My end goal of a work is often a moving target, rather than a fixed outcome, which gives me some freedom to be flexible and allow the site to work its magic. I feel like there’s much greater potential for something magical to happen, than if I was the only one in charge.
2. You’ve described your process as “site-determined,” adapting works to unique
locations. Can you share how a specific setting has transformed your concept or
outcome in a project?
J: One of the first land art project I ever did, “Arc One” back in 2009 taught me so much about how to approach working with a dynamic landscape and how to read the site for opportunities to create something unique. It was originally a 100m long arc of lighting, dug into the surface of a salt lake. I imagined it would become encrusted with salt over time and situate itself as part of the site almost as if it had always been there.
I left it there for a month and over that time, the curve had been manipulated by the subtle tidal flows of the site (which I didn’t get a chance to observe during the short installation period). The line of it became so much more interesting and its physicality influenced the surrounding salt forms and evaporation process. It was like this perfect dialogue between the materials, one introduced by me and the other being elementally present at the site. This surprising outcome has informed my work ever since.
3. Many of your pieces explore the boundary between the ephemeral (mist, light) and the permanent (steel, structure). What draws you to this liminal space, and how do you translate it into a tangible experience?
J: The way I see it, we exist on a constant threshold of change; the chaos of everything and our ability to perceive it, or tendency to deny it is something ingrained in our physiology. We tend to understand everything in terms of relationships and context. We exist entirely in an impossible moment between past and future although we’re almost never perceive it since our memories are embedded within context and our experiences are framed by memory.
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I think by engaging people completely, with all their senses and creating something new and unexpected, and without visual clutter or symbolism (I’m very conscious of breaking the experience of my work with intellect) it can bypass people’s liminalexperience and give them something new, something their mind can use to shift
their perception of reality.
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I’m really interested in Bayesian Inference theory as a fundamental framework of our model of reality, in that live sensory data is constantly cross-referenced with prior experience (memory) to build and calibrate our reality as we explore the world in real time. By using familiar materials (water, light etc) but presenting them in a unique and new form in which to be experienced, it can become a powerful reset, or at least a tweak of our preconceived reality and give us a chance to view the world with a more open mind. I’d love for people to reset their relationship with nature in a way that is more about coexistence than resource use or control, or stop being so anthropocentric in our relationship with it. This is the core aim of my work.
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4. With experience in permanent public commissions and ephemeral land interventions, how does your thinking change when creating for longevity versus those meant to vanish over time?
J: I try not to change my approach too much as I find that on permanent commissions it’s easy to get bogged down in structural or durability design problems and end up compromising the original vision for the work. Much of my temporary work needs to be designed to be almost semi-permanent in order to withstand the site conditions for a lengthy period (at least those which are commissioned this way), so it’s not such a shift to work towards permanent installations.​
My earlier temporary works and site experiments were very temporal in nature, often only there for one night so in that context there’s almost no consideration of longevity – it gives me a lot of freedom to explore materials and ways to interact with the site which has given me a useful toolkit to employ when working on larger permanent commissions.
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With permanent works, the structural elements tend to have much more of a presence and need to be considered as part of the viewer’s experience, so they need to be designed or finished in a way that makes a valuable contribution. This is often where the budget starts to grow exponentially, but I feel it’s necessary.
5. Light often plays a central role in your installations—not as illumination, but as material. What is it about light that makes it such a compelling element in your work?
J: So much of our experience and understanding of the world is through light, and it’s often completely subliminal – which makes it the perfect medium to inhabit this space in people’s minds through my work. When I first started working with light, there was no RGB LEDs or digital controls or anything like that. There was just light. And it was enough back then - I think it still is. I’m grateful for this experience as it taught me to work with it as an elemental material and understand the “stuff” of it better.
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I also started working with water around the same time during this developmental phase nearly 20 years ago, though I didn’t realise how important water was to my work until some years later. I became distinctly aware of the synergy between these two materials, how perfectly they interact and how similarly they behave. After all, they’re both the cornerstones of life.
