Anne Buckwalter

The painter Anne Buckwalter, 38, says she doesn’t like clutter, but she makes an exception for bird decoys, which occupy surfaces throughout her house in Durham, Maine. “Anywhere there’s an empty space where a duck could go, there’s probably a duck there,” she says. She acquired many of them from her grandfather, a professional decoy carver and retailer, and her father, a hobbyist carver and collector. Long used by hunters to attract waterfowl, decoys have evolved into a folk art tradition over the past century — one that’s highly regional, since artisans often carve local birds.

The objects that adorn American homes are particularly interesting to Buckwalter, who paints domestic interiors and the sexual exploits that take place within them. The work in her recent exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, for example, was inspired by visits to female-owned homesteads in New England. Buckwalter, whose current show at the New York gallery Uffner & Liu runs through Nov. 1, has rejected many of the political and religious beliefs she grew up with as a member of a Methodist church in conservative Lancaster, Pa. But the decoys, carved from woods such as pine and white cedar, represent the parts of her upbringing she’s chosen to hold on to. They’re “a tether to my past self,” she says, “and my sense of home.”

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