Underground School Bus Studio

People often ask why I buried a school bus. I’d love to give them a thoughtful answer about insulation or some clever technical reason. The honest answer is that I felt like it. Why not?

In November 2020, about eleven months into living off-grid, we had started hosting people through a work-trade program and needed an indoor place for everyone to gather and get out of the elements. The contractor doing my road work had an old school bus he wanted to get rid of.

“What do you think about burying the bus?” I asked.

“Pay me to dig the hole.”

He brought it out and lowered it into the ground. It had no engine, was riddled with bullet holes, covered in graffiti and filthy inside. We gutted it and did the renovations ourselves, turning it into a community gathering space and extra accommodation for the people staying with us.

After four years, the work-trade program I ran through Terraform Together wound down. A few years later, I got into pottery and needed more studio space. I renovated the bus again, this time into a pottery studio, office and shipping station. Alongside a solar-powered kiln setup that lets me fire completely off-grid, it has become an essential part of making work on the homestead.

Its life as a vehicle was over. Even after being discarded and abused, it was something I could imagine a future for. First it became a place for people to gather, then a place to make.

There’s something fitting about where it has led. Inside a discarded bus given another life, I now make sculptures from materials finding another life of their own. I didn’t plan that connection. It’s one I’ve come to appreciate as the work has grown.

Sometimes a project begins simply because it seems cool and interesting. For me, that is reason enough to see where it might lead.