We built a house with Thomas Doyle

1.) We would like to welcome you to Underworld Magazines. Please introduce yourself. Could you explain to us how you started and became known in your field.

My fascination with scale models and the miniature began at a young age; I made my first diorama at the age of 3 with a plastic penguin, blue and white Play-doh, and a scrap of wood. Two decades later, after spending time learning to paint and make mono- and lithographic prints, I became dissatisfied with those media, and started looking around for something else to convey the narratives in my head. It was then that I decided to start playing around with miniatures and models again, something I hadn’t done since I was in my early teens. That was about seven years ago. Since then I’ve been showing the works at galleries and art spaces both here and abroad.

2.) What’s the first step in your process when creating new art? How do you get the ideas for your first step?

The first step toward a new piece is often the fastest part of the process. The ideas come to me randomly, often while daydreaming, reading, or doing something entirely unrelated to my artwork. I typically don’t go looking for ideas for new work; they find me. A piece may start as an image in my mind, a scene I want to see brought into form. I then spend time sketching it out, tangling with it, working it from different vantage points until I’m happy with where it is headed. It is then that I execute the work; the most labor-intensive part of the process, this can take literally hundreds of hours.

3.) Thomas, what exactly do you call the field you work in, and is it competitive? If it isn’t why do you think that is, and if it is how do you over come that?

When people ask what kind of artwork I make, I typically tell them I’m a sculptor, but that really doesn’t describe it. “Miniaturist” or “diorama-maker” or “model-maker” probably comes closer. There are other artists doing wonderful work with similar media, some of whom exhibit in the artworld. I’m happy to be able to focus on making work and taking the opportunities as they come. I don’t get wrapped up in the competitive nature of the artworld—it distracts from the real work that happens in the studio.

4.) Could you pick one of your favorite pieces and walk us through on how you created it?

The piece “Escalation,” created last autumn, sprang from a story I heard years ago. My father worked at an auto factory with a large cast of characters, one of whom was a drug-addled hothead who gathered all of his estranged wife’s possessions from their home, piled them in the backyard, chopped them with an ax, and set them aflame. The bizarre brutality of this act always seemed so cinematic to me, and years later it sparked what you see in “Escalation.” That work was sketched out long ago—you can see an early drawing in the “sketchbook” section of my web site. The original idea for the work evolved over time to meet my needs. Thought the original event took place in a backyard, the household goods in the piece are instead piled up in a clearing—a motif that appears in much of my work—and a child, peering in from behind a tree, has been added.

5.) While creating your art, what material do you mainly rely on? Is it hard to get a hold of some of the material?

The materials I use in my work come more from hardware stores and model train shops than art stores. Nearly everything is altered, however. For example, in the work “Escalation,” I spent a lot of time gathering the household goods that ended up in the clearing; these were sanded, assembled, painted, heaped into a pile, and glued in place. When I can’t get what I need, I make it myself through a process called “scratch-building.” The mattress on the bed in the piece “Escalation” is made of matboard; the sheet is a piece of thin origami paper.

6.) We just want to thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. A lot of our readers are very interested in what you do. Do you have a final thought for them?