Construction Diary: How Two Artists Turned a Cabin Outside Joshua Tree Into a Clear-Minded Retreat

To spin the phrase, one person’s discarded ceramic castings are another’s art supplies—which is true for Aaron Glasson. A recent piece by the New Zealand–born artist, Monument, is a patchwork of brick, tile, and more ephemera he sourced from abandoned buildings in Shigaraki, Japan. "I make a lot of bricolage sculpture, which is the use of found objects," Aaron tells me at his cabin in Landers, near Joshua Tree, California. "I think that ethos kind of came across in the construction of the house, too."

The part-time home and artist residency he created with friend and fellow artist Prescott McCarthy, in fact, started with a found object of sorts: a circa-1956 homestead cabin with a dust-caked exterior "that you could never re-create," says Aaron. After buying the property in 2020, he and Prescott updated it as if it were a piece of bricolage art, introducing secondhand elements found, gifted, and purchased to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

Prescott has since moved on, but Aaron has now added a studio with another sleeping area to the property, among other improvements. Today he hosts artists to share the Mojave Desert’s quietude and what creativity it may inspire, using the land as home base between exhibitions in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Japan, where he used to live. As a trickle of piano music leaks from a hidden speaker in the kitchen, Aaron shares how his and Prescott’s cabin took shape, piece by piece.

Grandpa’s Cabin

When Prescott and I bought the property, it was pretty cleaned up. It was called Grandpa’s Cabin by the sellers. It’s a homestead cabin, and I think their grandfather used it as a getaway. There are a lot of them in the area, and some are really derelict, but this one had good bones.

Prescott and I had no plan. We pulled up the carpet not knowing what was underneath, and the whole concrete floor was crazily cracked, so we had it repoured. We replaced some of the drywall, keeping as much of the original as we could. The redwood ceiling beam was completely covered—we didn’t even know it was there. We pulled out the kitchen, added a door, and ripped out the bathroom, too.