RANDAL THURSTON

Laser cut paper of real and imaginary insects evoking a Victorian scientific display.

My work is about beauty and mortality. I am intensely aware of the transitory nature of life and use imagery associated with the idea of mortality as a way of exploring what it means to be alive.

The images I incorporate include those derived primarily from the natural world. The flora and fauna that surrounds us are a source of beauty and metaphor; my goal is to create work that reacquaints us with the world we live in and remind us of how fragile it is.

GREAT PIECE OF TURF was a site-specific installation for “Still Life Lives!” at the Fitchburg Art Museum.

OUROBOROS is a meditation on life, death and regeneration. The title refers to the image of a great snake consuming its tail. As a mythological creature, the ouroboros represents the cycle of the seasons, the potential of action before creation, and the idea of awareness through the cognitive process. It also figures in the history of alchemy, representing the androgyny, an attempt to unify male and female.

Without actually using the image of the Ouroboros, I’ve adapted a variety of natural forms to explore ideas such as hybridization, disease and beauty. Much of the work is inspired by cellular designs. The large egg like forms is derived from ovary cells. The spiny, neurons originated as collages of Bonsai trees. The mass of flora is perennials. Other sources include thyroid cells and viruses.

In an indirect way, the neurons represent consciousness, the ovaries birth, and the thyroid physiological change. The perennials, perhaps easiest to identify, represent both beauty and the temporality of life. Within them a variety of mutations are introduced as a way of thinking about how we are in the world. I’ve thought a lot about the way nature is when observed within the context of our every day life. The cells are an attempt to see the microscopic world on a large stage. 

Drawing is a way of thinking. Of all the forms of expression, I believe it is the one that most directly communicates experience. Fascinated with contour, I’ve spent the last 30 years creating silhouettes whose believability as representations of things rests solely on my ability to accurately summarize their identities through a solitary outline. Because we can recognize and understand flat shapes whose nuances happen to remind us of things we have seen, I can cut out a piece of back paper and have someone think of a plant when they look at it. It is an echo of the real world, but one that allows us to understand what we know, and sometimes, what we don’t. This is a wonderful ability to possess and speaks volumes about how we comprehend the world. 

THE COUNTING HOUSE is a meditation on life and death. The title, drawn from Dickens’, evokes a 19th Century room occupied by the activity of accounting. The imagery combines rococo flourishes and bones that echo the ossuaries of eastern Europe. I imagined the currency being tabulated to be that of souls. 

NATURAL WORLD grew out of a visit to Paris. I often find that the most compelling experiences are unexpected. I had thought before travelling that I would spend all of my time in the Louvre, but it was the remarkable richness of the city’s stained glass that made the greatest impression. My reaction to the rosette windows of Notre Dame and the light washed interior of Sainte Chapelle was to mimic the ornate circular designs using animals, plants and insects.  

Using Victorian motifs, MARLEY is inspired by Dicken's A Christmas Carol.

This piece was installed at ARTSPACE, New Haven and Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston.

The golem is a creation of the Jewish faith that is sometimes given physical form. Assembled by a rabbi, the process begins by combining virgin earth and spring water to make clay. The mixture is then sculpted into a figure. It is chanted into existence, limb by limb, using all 231 precisely arranged permutations of the letters YHVH. The strict order, careful recitation and use of pure ingredients yield a creature that is a union of physical labor and mystical experience. It has been suggested that the golem is the Rabbi’s doppelganger, a reflection of himself created through devout practice. The double allows its maker to see his faults on a journey to self-knowledge.

DOPPELGANGER is an exploration of three creatures: Frankenstein’s monster, the Golem and the Homunculus. Although they inhabit the different realms of science, faith and self-awareness, these monsters probably share a common source. Their ritual creation, distorted appearance and unpredictable behavior say a great deal about their creators. Frankenstein sought to animate an inert being through a rigorous study of natural science but found the product of his labors to be hideous and fled. Rabbi Loew chanted the Golem of Prague into existence from clay then regretted both its progressive growth and burgeoning sentience. The Homunculus, a miniature man created in an alchemical vessel, escaped before it could aid its maker in his work.

These legends pose basic questions about the search for knowledge, identity and transformation. In keeping with this idea, the imagery and arrangement I used reflects order, speculation and chance. 

Curator Deborah Davidson wrote: Something is communicated in a drawing that has remained a constant for centuries — an intimacy of expression that is otherwise the province of writing.  Drawing is the basis of all art and visual thinking.  It is a way to visualize thinking, that is, to depict something that is imagined before it is drawn.

My response for her exhibition Cannot Be Described in Words: Drawing/Daring at the Duxbury Art Complex was to consider how phobias reside in both our imaginations and our waking lives. They are imagined before they are lived.

Sourced from an extensive lists of fears that are the result of trauma, projection and obsession, PHOBIA takes the form of a tumbling river of words describing mundane and arcane fears that stream across the wall like a run-on sentence of increasing urgency. 

THICKET and FIELD NOTES make up the immersive installation at Lechmere station, part the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Green Line Extension (GLX). Incorporating both Frit on glass and digital screen printing on enamel coated steel panels, the expansive integrated work was recognized by CODAzine as one of 6 Projects that Transform Transit Hubs.

THICKET, a ceramic printed helix of climbing vines covers the three glass elevator enclosures, rising with passengers as they travel from street level to the station platform. Meant to provide a moment of nature inspired wonder as the elevators rise, the undulating design also alludes to central movement is to the transit experience.

The four panels that make up FIELD NOTES were inspired by the terrain and history of the land surrounding Lechmere Station.

FIELD NOTES takes its name from the practice of observation and reflection naturalists use to understand the world. By keeping records of the migratory patterns of birds, the river's ebb and flow, and the cyclical rhythms of flowers and trees, they develop both knowledge and memory of a place and its inhabitants.

Each platform panel is composed of vignettes that feature the flora and fauna found in North Point Park throughout the year. In the background are excerpts from the notebooks of William Brewster, a 19th century ornithologist who spent his life studying the birds of Cambridge, Somerville and the surrounding area.

My interest in creating artwork that incorporates nature comes from a sensibility that is very much like Brewster's. By paying attention to both wing and leaf, I get a clearer sense and deeper understanding of my place in the world.

Public art works utilizing nature and memory.