American Scientist

Artist Tyler Thrasher has a big personality, and he’s not going to tone it down. Indeed, his genuine enthusiasm and fascination are some of the hallmarks that have catapulted him to artistic success. Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Thrasher is best known for growing crystal formations on organic remains, especially cicadas, but his endeavors don’t end there. He also hybridizes plants, makes music, and produces clothing for Black Lives Matter fundraising. Thrasher developed and donated hundreds of science kits to children in underfunded schools. His current work is an installation of ghostly bleached plants and insects at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. Thrasher discussed his explorative approach to science-inspired art with Editor-in-Chief Fenella Saunders. This online article is an extended version of the one that appeared in print.

What got you interested in science?

My dad was a landscaper. I grew up surrounded by plants. My dad had these absolutely mesmerizing gardens that I would often explore. So as a kid I spent a lot of time exploring in nature, literally in my own backyard—a lot of time exploring and tinkering. My degree is actually in computer animation and art history. Anything I do with science is mostly self-taught, a fun sort of side venue for my creative expression.

What are your thoughts on how people can better see science as not just something you learn in school, but something you experience?

When I was growing up, school was like, here’s the book, here’s the chapter, here’s the test. But looking back, I was doing science every day, when I was left to my own devices in the natural world. I just didn’t call it science. It was an escape, or it was me being fascinated. I do think science comes naturally to most people, but we don’t like to be in those boxes with it. Now, when I share my experiments or my hybridizing of plants, one response I usually get is, man, I wish I had you as a science teacher. I don’t think I’m doing anything special. I’m just doing what I enjoy, and I’m sharing how I do it. I wish there was more of that in science, where we encourage kids to view science as an everyday thing, not just a sit-in-a-room-with-a-book thing.

How did you combine your art background with your interest in caving and mineralogy to get where you are?

I doodled throughout school, but my art fascination started with a supportive high school teacher. In college I went on a caving adventure. My first cave experience was like my mind was just catapulted. If you spend enough time underground, isolated from other humans, you start to view the world a little differently. I started looking at all these old structures, which outdated anything I had learned about in history class. I found myself drawing crystals and minerals I’d seen in a cave. I even started shading my art in ways that resembled mineral formations or textures. Next thing I knew I thought, what if I grew my own crystals? I had a chemistry background from high school, so I knew how to grow crystals. What if I grew crystals on something that’s not expected? Not rocks. I found a little cicada shell outside and I wondered if I could grow crystals on an insect exoskeleton. Would the body break down? Would it react? There were no papers or journals on crystallizing insect carcasses; the only way to find out was to try it. I downloaded free science journals where I could. I’d buy old college textbooks and just sift through and gather notes. I crystallized a cicada shell, and the first time I saw it, again, my mind was just enraptured. I shared an image of it on the internet, and it didn’t take long before other people also thought it was the craziest thing they’d ever seen. It became my full-time job, mostly just because I explored. I had something I was curious about, and I just did it. It changed my life completely.

There seems to be a lot of serendipity in your process, maybe because you were open to taking chances?

I’ve always had this tendency where if I see an opportunity, I just try it. I’ve learned that the worst that can happen is someone doesn’t respond or just says no, but you’re not going to lose your resources. And so I’ve always had this mindset of just ask for it. As my art started to take off in college, I reached out to a famous artist I really liked, who was making a lot of art with cicadas at the time. I said, “Hey, I’m crystallizing cicadas, can I send you one for a sketch?” She responded and said yes. She shared it online, and my art blew up because of that. It was always me testing: What can I get out of life, and how can I keep having this dance with opportunity? Most of the time it’s been rewarding, which only perpetuates itself. I’ve learned to listen and respect my process and respect the world around me and give back as much as I get in a way that can help propel my art forward.

How would you describe your artistic aesthetic?

I think for me the way I categorize my art is just how can I take the atoms around me and make something new? How can I use the natural world around me as a palette, like a box of brushes and paints? How can I look at the world like a big Lego box and tinker and have fun? I never really stopped to say, where does my art fit? I think science art is a good mix, but I really think I’m just tinkering and having fun.

When you first started crystallizing things, was that easy?

There was a lot of trial and error at first. That’s mainly my fault. I don’t like instructions. I like to just try things on my own and learn all the ways to go wrong. After that it became really easy. Growing crystals is as simple as taking a compound that deionizes in water, supersaturate the solution, put something in it, and crystals will nucleate and grow. All systems are looking for equilibrium. Once you understand that, my job as an artist is to destroy the equilibrium, add a dollop of chaos—that’s literally what dissolving and breaking down compounds is—and watch how the chaos can make something new.

Crystal nucleation points are basically imperfections, places where something can grab hold. Does that figure in your work, that you’re using imperfections to make art?

That’s the big one. In a way, yes, it’s me relying on the natural imperfections of organic objects. Cicadas have all these grooves and scratches on the exoskeleton from having survived in the wild. Every scratch or ding is a spot where a molecule can rest and pull in other molecules and crystallize around it. In a fun way, my art does heavily rely on imperfections to make something visually satisfying.

Do you have any insights to why crystals grow larger in certain places than others?

There are so many theories. There’s a lot going on in any given vat. One example I could offer is say I float a cicada on the top of a crystal vat. The way I set the cicada in, some of the solution goes over one of the wings. The wing gets a little waterlogged and the cicada tilts at an angle. All of a sudden, that half of the cicada is breaking the surface tension enough that it forms this vacuum where, when crystals start to grow on the surface of the solution, they’ll follow that flow line where the surface tension is breaking and flow to that part of the cicada. Then once those crystals grow, all of a sudden they’re pulling in more molecules. Sometimes if the cicada comes out more crystallized on one half than the other, that’s why. That’s all dependent on how many pieces are in the vat, what’s on top of what, how things are sitting there in the solution, that attracts and controls where crystals grow and how the molecules and ions move in that system.

Do you ever try to control that, or do you leave it to chance?

Scientifically I know exactly what’s going to happen, but it leaves this tiny little margin for surprise, where every now and then, maybe one in every 200 pieces I make, something happens that I didn’t expect, and it’s so inspiring. So I don’t control it, because that tiny margin of surprise is kind of what I live for when it comes to making art.

The colors that you get are all done just by using different chemicals?

It’s all dependent on the molecule and how it interacts with light. I don’t add any dyes. I just pick the piece and pick the chemical based on the color the crystal will be and go from there.

Now you’re growing opals. How does that work?

That’s crazy. I love opals. Growing opals is a fun process, because opals aren’t minerals or mineraloids. The structure of opals completely depends on the nano-silica spheres that line up to diffract light, like a kaleidoscope. Essentially you have to find a way to produce silica nanoparticles that are the same size in a system, and then let them naturally sediment over time. Then they stack on top of one another like a bunch of marbles, perfectly lined up, so light can come in. All I do is make that system. I put in all the right solvents and catalysts and all the things needed to make silica nanoparticles, and then often I’ll take a flower or an insect and let those particles drip down on it. If I’m lucky they’ll settle in just the right way to opalize something.

Does that take a long time?

It depends. I’ve come up with a system where I take that known reaction and I add a material that absorbs all the solvents almost immediately, leaving just the nanoparticles, so I can opalize something in about three days, based on this interaction. But the trick is, you don’t know if it’s working until all the particles have settled, and often you just have a white glob. You don’t have a precious opal. You just have to cross your fingers. And in addition you can’t have any vibration or any drastic temperature change. Even the solvents evaporating can disrupt the particles trying to settle. A lot of things come into making opals. Once you understand how to make opals, it makes you appreciate naturally occurring opals so much more.

What do you think your success rate is?

I’d say 50-50. But I know I can get it higher. Even something like the neighbors hammering something on the wall can shake all my particles. If I have the proper setup I could probably get a 90-percent success rate. If I could have a vibration-free, temperature-consistent opal room, that would be the dream.

How do you think that art and science overlap and fit together?

For the most part I think they’re the same thing, just with different goals. Art and science are the human brain’s way of understanding the world in reality around us. Both are trying to communicate reality to some degree. Art can be a catalyst for emotion, conversation, dialogue, political movement. More of those abstract ideas that don’t provide hard answers. And science sometimes wants to do that, but science has to have the hard answers. The difference is, both routes require a human to look at the world around them, be curious and want answers, but art doesn’t necessarily give you the answer. Science’s job is to always look back and always be doubtful and always refine, refine, refine. The point of art isn’t to look at everything you did wrong and go and make it better necessarily. But I do think both schools largely deal with trying to understand and communicate the world around us. Both scientists and artists do exactly this.

How can we find a balance between learning standard techniques and still keeping creativity and personal direction?

I think we need both. The formal education shows us the toolbox. Here are some tools. They’ve been around for decades. This is how you can use them. But I want to see fewer limits on what those tools can do. We can’t just go out into the world without tools and come out a mess or do something crazy and hurt ourselves. We should be shown what the tools are and told and encouraged that these tools are for us to use how we want to use them.

Do you feel that you want to be a role model for science outreach?

I do want to encourage people to explore the world. It’s your world. It’s your home. Have fun. But there is always this looming goblin behind me from bigger institutions or even other scientists who have messaged me to remind me that I’m not a real scientist. I’ve had people who’ve told me that I’ve encouraged science in their lives more than their science teachers did. I do find comfort where I see there are leading scientists who have faced opposition and criticism, but have led some groundbreaking work. If they can survive that, then maybe I can get myself together and come in with my little science flag too and say what I need to say.

You give yourself a mad scientist label, a bit as a joke. But do you think that perpetuates the idea that madness is required to have creativity in science?

There are times when I’m in my lab and if something works and I put it under the microscope, I will literally jump up, scream, hop on my skateboard with my lab coat, and do laps while shouting in joy. On the outside, someone would look and say, that dude is mad. And I’m like, no, you don’t get how cool the world is! I think the mad part is just another synonym for—I don’t know, madly inspired. So I think the mad part is just me trying to contain how cool I think the world is.

You had a lot of involvement in 2020 with Black Lives Matter. What are your thoughts on increasing trust and inclusion in science?

Growing up as a BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] American, very poor, and having friends who grew up in North Tulsa, which is largely a Black community that’s very underserved, science is not a priority. The priority, we’re told, is survival. A lot of Black Americans are in a place where we don’t feel like we can afford to stop and look at things like science and the arts and all this stuff that gets higher up on that hierarchy of needs. Science isn’t prioritized in school with Black kids. It comes down to teachers who can encourage that, and they have to have those uncomfortable conversations. They have to stop and look at their Black students and say, “You could be a scientist.” I was one of three Black kids in my chemistry class, and we were kind of ostracized. We make these adventure kits, and we want to go to underserved communities and schools where they don’t have those activities and give a bunch of kids just a bag with tools in it and say, “Let’s go on a hike for two hours. What do you find?” Something as simple as that, encouraging exploration within the BIPOC community, that’s a big deal. We’re not shown that we’re allowed to explore. We’re not really shown that this is our world. When you take people and tell them that this isn’t really where they belong, why would they feel the need to explore it and do science, which is largely exploration? We need to change how we talk to Black kids about their possibilities and open it up for them to be able to explore the world.

Are you hopeful about change?

I think I’m a pretty optimistic, hopeful person when it comes to change. Humans, we’re really young. Science is even younger. I think we’re going to get to a point, hopefully, where we will get things back on track. We’ll consider other ways to look at science and approach it, and listen to other types of scientists. How do we scientifically view what is science? All these conversations are happening. So I do remain very hopeful that the conversation will change and humans will get it together, because we’re all essentially just celestial toddlers trying to figure this whole thing out. We have not been here very long. We’re just a bunch of molecules, chaotically zipping through space and time. We’ll get there. We’ll figure it out—just not overnight.

You have listed hundreds of crystallized snail shells for $1 each and donated hundreds of science kits. Who do you reach with those programs?

I got all these emails from hundreds of people who said, I really want some of your art, I was really hoping for it this year, but then I lost my job, or I have kids that haven’t been in school. A lot of people have had a bummer year. I thought it would be really nice to share this. I decided to list 200 snail shells for a dollar, and either it’s adults who lost their jobs or parents who have kids who have been sitting in the house all year looking at a computer. They need something to inspire them or spark their imagination. Parents got snail shells just to give them to their kids, give them something to say, “Whoa!” If you can just say “Whoa!” once this year—just any tiny sparkle we can get—there’s that. And then with the science kits we did earlier this year, I put together some chemistry kits, and we went into North Tulsa. I know some schools here that just don’t prioritize science because they don’t have the funding or encouragement. We went to their front porches and dropped off around 100 science kits. For me it’s just for whoever needs it.

What makes art successful?

That is a question. I think it’s a mixture of character, probably resourcefulness, and a little bit of luck. Once I found my community and reached out to those people, they started to reach out to like-minded people. Once you see something working, it’s like growing plants: You have to tend to it and pay attention. On top of all that, you have to be a semi-decent human, too. It’s a mixture of, what do you give back? Do you use your art to connect with others, or is it more self-indulgent? What’s the purpose of your art? Does it make people feel good? I think it’s just being genuine. It’s scary to be yourself, because we’re afraid of being rejected. I’m this crazy, excited, loud, energetic individual, and I’m not going to be quiet to make people comfortable. I think a lot of people respond well to artists being themselves and making the art that they believe in.