About

I really just wanted to tell stories.

During my formal art training as a painter and printmaker, I found myself making images that seemed like film stills from a larger movie. They excited me, but I felt the limitations of the media; something was keeping me from immersing viewers into the worlds I imagined. I stopped making work.

When I started again, I was making dioramas. 

These works, crafted in miniature scales and marked by the uncanny and the surreal, allowed me to draw viewers into narratives in ways I couldn’t achieve with paint on canvas. The small-scale sculptures I create range in size from just a few inches across to site-specific installations that cover tens of feet. 

Working in miniature scales appeals to me the same way action figures, dollhouses, and shoebox dioramas did when I was a child: they allow me to create self-contained worlds in which I can bend the laws of reality to create the narrative scenes I envision. I use miniature materials as I would any other medium—as a conduit to communicate ideas, inspire awe, and draw users into the worlds I’ve created.

My works begin as pencil sketches, elements of which I will often render in three dimensions with digital modeling software. These modeled elements are then printed in resin, processed, painted, detailed, and finally situated within scale-model environments that I sculpt from styrene, wood, foam, plaster, papier mache, natural elements, oils and acrylics, and myriad other materials. 

Over the course of the last twenty years my work has been shown at the Diesel Art Gallery, in Tokyo, Japan (2019); Hudson River Museum, in Yonkers, New York (2016); the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2012); the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2011); and at museums and galleries across the US, Europe, and Asia. In addition to exhibiting in galleries and museums, my work has appeared in the opening credits for the HBO series Murder on Middle Beach, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and other publications. You can view my full CV here.

For the past decade, my practice has attempted to grapple with our current period of rapid technological and ecological change. My most recent works adopt a perspective perched amid the post-technological wastelands and flooded strip malls of the future. These works are meant to confront the question future civilizations will surely ask: What were people in the early 21st Century thinking?  

To inquire about exhibition opportunities, illustration engagements, or available work you can contact me at occupant@thomasdoyle.net. You can also sign up for my mailing list to receive a few updates a year about exhibitions and projects.

Photo by Lauren Acampora.