Thomas Doyle's miniature sculptural art nods heavily towards a nostalgic history of kitsch, seaside souvenirs and snow globes, and even further back to a Victorian delight for whimsy and the trinketry of a generation of mildly engaged tourists determined to show on some small scale they are relatively 'well travelled' – if only in the most parochial of senses.
That's where the similarity between Doyle's art and the mass made low-cost paraphernalia of the past ends. It's a deceptive ruse, an open invitation to the uninquiring mind and conservative opinionate, to think again about the world we live in. Perfection is a myth, in an expanding scale of relativity, both macroscopic and microscopic, one will eventually find fault with any idealised vision of life, society, mankind. The same process unfolds on every viewing of Thomas Doyle's dioramas of pain.
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In a strange way Doyle's work reminds me of the often debunked yet still intriguing 'Stone Tape Theory'. The premise being, should a violent or extreme act, be it physically or emotionally should have occurred in the past, a re-enactment of the event will forever be replayed within that precise location. The ghosts of violence past, captured forever, sealed in the very bricks of a building or structure much like a recording, ever to be replayed for posterity should an audience encroach.
Technically Doyle's dioramas are perfectly scaled down and modelled renditions of everyday suburban life. However unlike mass-made souvenir 'snow globes', the viewer is rewarded with something other than the usual idealised vision of life one might expect from, but rather a voyeuristic and prurient view of lives shattered by violence, deceit, malevolence, and guilt. His minute characters can be seen burying their murdered victims, suffering emotional turmoil, sharing pain and fear, experiencing isolation, cannibalism, dimensional shift, in fact almost everything a real human being can feel or imagine is explored in Doyle's inimitable style.
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As of now he has completed three series entitled 'Distillations', 'Reclamations', and 'Bearings'. Following a childhood obsessions with modelling miniatures, and an early artistic career creating and printing mono and lithographic prints, Doyle began to feel that his ideas and subject matter were best suited to the microscopic world of the diorama. Personally, Doyle prefers to stay on the sidelines of art discussion, his work is not easily categorised, and his subject matter belies his particular medium. Yet, as with all model makers, Doyle spends a vast majority of his time painstakingly working on detailed figurines, houses, trees, lawns and so on. His influences are varied, be it urban myths, news media, the surburban world in which he inhabits. The distillation of these influential factors is a subconscious process, something much like a screenplay writer envisioning a pitch for a movie, the events and characters forming the overall look of the piece in question.
In an interview with UndergroundMagazines.com Doyle explains the story behind his work Escalation, part of the Distillations series – "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 another of his works The Reprisal, a male and female couple are seen preparing to bury the corpses of another couple, however all is not as it seems at first glance. Notice the shoes on the female body match those of the female perpetrator, as do the jeans match the male's, to me this transforms the piece from a potential scene in CSI, to something far more metaphorical, indeed even mystical. The idea of renewal, revenge on past selves, and drawing a line under a past that will forever be forgotten.
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Asides concurrent themes of the home, both as sanctuary and hub of traumatic memories, Doyle also toys with the themes of time and context. Utilising the power of his chosen medium to its fullest, his 'frozen moments' as displayed in such works as Something in the Absence from the Bearings series and Clearing (UXO), offer more than a glimpse into his intentions as an artist, and the emotional relationship Doyle has formed with his process of creation. Akin to a slither of time or reality, made concrete and permanent and affixed for all eternity under the protective shell of a glass bell jar. A slice of life trapped within the a single still from a movie, ensconsced in its own shroud of tantalising mystery, forever forsaking the before and after, the continuity of events that so often breeds and instills an insentivity or even irreverance towards pain and suffering in everyday life. But beyond that are themes of the omnipresent myth, the order of things, the giganticism of exterior context that relatively speaking reduces the greatest and most aspirational teachings and knowledge of man to mere dust.
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In Thomas Doyle's world, we are gods, giants looming over in prurient curiosity, objectively reviewing the miniscule machinations of a microscopic race, their limitations both physically and intellectually, suffocated by their lack of scale, held down by the great weight of objective distance, and molecularised subjectivity.
View more of Thomas Doyle's work at www.ThomasDoyle.net.
Wow, these are like completely demented “Lilliput Lane” statues!