The practice of Boston-based Tory Fair consists of a captivating blend of body and ecology. In her recent work, which involves casting live sunflowers, she is not bound by fidelity to natural forms; instead, she allows material and process to imprint on making. Kinetics and interactivity add another level of dynamic unpredictability to the sculptures in “Protest Flowers,” her current show at Odd-Kin in Providence, Rhode Island. As these moving flowers flail and tense through an exquisitely uncomfortable ballet, they draw us into a space of active engagement so that looking becomes more of an act of being.
Mallory A. Ruymann: I meet many artists who lead a solitary studio existence. You are very socially located.
Tory Fair: I’ve been teaching at Brandeis University for 25 years and finally moved to a studio on campus a year ago. Even though a lot is happening directly outside my door, I’m alone with my flowers in the studio. One way I get out is by sourcing flowers from growing partners in the community. I dig the flowers out of the ground whole and cast them in a synthetic rubber mixture that includes silicone and dirt. I love how the resulting material—rugged, industrial, and flexible—embodies resilience and adaptability.
MAR: Your studio is filled to the brim with cast flowers.
TF: In addition to prepping for “Protest Flowers,” I have been working on a public sculpture project for Copley Square in Boston. The show at Odd-Kin, in particular, has to do with the movement, both in terms of the material that I use for casting and via kinetics, which heightens the qualities of the rubber.
MAR: How does material determine form when casting, and what amount of artistic intervention do your casts require?
TF: All of my flowers have a certain amount of grit. I’m taking something fragile and fragrant, turning it into something rugged and tough. When I started working with flowers in 2010, I used a 3D printer to replicate them because the parts were too thin to cast. I was also thinking about the flowers in relation to my body; at that time, I swarmed them in gestures with my body, so they acted like portals, transporting viewers through the floor, the wall, and outside the gallery’s boundaries. The flowers endorsed how our imaginations are real. As I expanded the conceptual gesture and grew in process, I hacked a way to cast larger flowers from life directly, which is messy and involves touch and feel, but there is fidelity to the original flower, a memory of it, in addition to a sculpture.
For the Copley Square project, I’m working with Sincere Foundry to translate silicone and dirt to bronze, making the sculptures durable while also retaining the grit of the dirt in the glamor of the bronze. The flowers won’t move, but I’m focused on creating expressive gestures. The act of leaving flowers in public can relate to moments of love, grief, and memory, and I hope the sculptures might even provide a place for people to offer their own flowers, like an improvised altar.
MAR: Do viewers fixate on the differences between an actual flower and your interpretation?
TF: People like that the sculptures directly relate to the actual thing. This is one of the main attractions of the Copley Square project, which will be made from flowers grown by local groups like the Fenway Victory Gardens. Translating the sculptures to the public realm with a permanent material means that I am thinking about how to retain the feeling of the rubber casts—that’s why I’m working with the idea of leaning the flowers on benches in repose, so they are both secure and accessible.
MAR: Postures of leaning are interesting because they are culturally specific. Americans, for instance, lean on everything. We can’t help but assume these contorted yet relaxed postures.
TF: For me, the lean has a feeling of engagement because it implies a temporary state intrinsically tied to daily life. We rest for only short periods.
MAR: You’re suggesting that movement and rest go hand in hand, and even though the Copley Square project will be in a static material (bronze), you are capturing a temporary state that happens most profoundly in the rubber works.
TF: Besides material, the details in the form are expressive. I mentioned my collaborative process with the flowers; leaves, for example, have an expressive gesture all their own. One of the first times these gestures became intrinsic to my practice was when Carly Glovinski invited me to collaborate at Wild Knoll Foundation Garden, her project at Surf Point Residency in York, Maine. For Sunflowers (2024), I placed my sculptural flowers around the garden, like a surreal invasive species activated by the wind from the nearby ocean. This installation reinforced ideas about encouraging movement within the sculptural form, which has now manifested into kinetics.
MAR: “Protest Flowers” indeed incorporates kinetics. How does electronically generated movement support engagement with the work?
TF: The kinetics help to pose questions for viewers. In Support Flowers (2025), visitors control the work’s movement via a wired controller. Are you tethered to the sculpture? Is it tethered to you? It’s like taking a dog for a walk—nothing high-tech about it.
MAR: There is something provisional about how you cast these flowers and capture their temporality. This is mimicked and amplified by the kinetics, which have been intentionally engineered in an amateur fashion that also enhances the overall form.
TF: The electronics are Kinetics 101—a bunch of ideas percolating around movement, demonstrating a discovery process. The show’s spirit is one of experimentation and is tied to my life. I grew up in New Jersey in the Great Swamp with a mother who became one of the leaders of the local environmental movement. We, of course, had an incredible garden, and I remember watching her dig there and how that evolved to “digging into” the greater state-wide landscape of policy to try to save the wetlands. Conceptually, these eco-activist tendencies find their way into my practice; simultaneously, I realize my silicone casting method is not entirely eco-friendly. However, I combine the silicone with dirt to generate a contradiction that makes the flowers dissolve into and emerge from ideas of landscape. It’s not about fidelity to the original. I want the flowers to be purposefully contradictory, to scream at you a little bit.
There are more specific biographical aspects in the work as well. For example, in the ’70s, I remember watching “The Secret Garden.” I loved this show because it featured a patch of flowers around a tree base that would giggle—the “Chuckle Patch.” I wanted to re-create that form in this exhibition, with flowers that move as if nervous or anxious. The hybridity of the robotics is visible, and the rubber’s flexibility allows the flowers to feel even more expressive.
MAR: You’ve captured all the moments in the life cycle of a flower—its popping out of the ground, growing, and dying.
TF: This exhibition is very much about grief. With getting older and losing loved ones, alongside the pandemic and the collective loss/fatigue of the climate crisis, bringing an element of grief into the work has been unavoidable. In a way, it’s devastating to watch Grief (2025), for example, try to turn. But in addition to agony, there is some fun. In Garden Gridlock (2025), the movements are timed so that the carts, each punctuated with a flower, back up and bump into each other in a permanent traffic jam.
MAR: Your cast sunflowers are aesthetically stunning and possess a certain degree of animus, a word often brought up in the context of sculpture. In this instance, it signifies something life-like with an intrinsic life force.
TF: I sometimes feel inadequate as an artist, because I was not taught many of the techniques that I use, so I’m just picking things up as I go along. Much of my learning was about allowing things to be messy and imperfect, about leaving my hand in at the seams. You have to make work you believe in, and with this body of work, I was particularly inspired by women at the periphery of Minimalism who said it was okay to be subjective and have trace, and who encouraged touch. I realized I could lean into my inadequacies and figure things out, often with community support. In my most fulfilling projects, I pass the ball back and forth with someone, and authorship feels more co-created.
MAR: It is essential to dispel the myth that to be a successful artist one must attain technical expertise. Minimalism took this idea to extremes with “finish fetish” and the interest in immutable materials/process, which the market still seems to demand from artists. It’s powerful, therefore, to be looking at people who resist the conditions of the market and explore materiality within the context of community. I believe there is a lot of power in unlearning, which can often lead to the most authentic expression.
TF: As a teacher, I believe the beginner’s mind often makes the best work, because there’s no expectation of “making art.” I began my undergraduate studies at Harvard thinking I would be an architect, but I ended up in sculpture. There hadn’t been a sculpture major in several years, so there wasn’t much of a curriculum, and my education was amazingly self-directed. After graduation, I got a Gardner Fellowship to travel across America and look at Native American sacred sites. I ended up working on Roden Crater with James Turrell. At that time, people like Mary Miss were on my radar, too, because they combined things like architecture and perception in a profoundly disruptive way. Turrell is making work about perception—he is not so much interested in conveying how he sees, but instead allowing us, as viewers, to see ourselves seeing. As Miss emphasizes, “Give the people the luxury of engagement and not confrontation.”
Years later, during my residency at RAIR [Recycled Artist in Residency, Philadelphia] in 2019, I reimagined Miss’s 1968 work, Portable Window, as a rolling eight-foot sculpture. Made at the pandemic’s start, it allowed me to engage people at a safe distance. Movement was key to that piece, so, since then, I’ve wanted to think further about mobility. Sculpture isn’t just an icon on a pedestal, but something to explore and understand as it slowly unfolds into the world.
MAR: Your interest in Mary Miss has transformed into an ongoing dialogue. In a panel discussion about Portable Window (ICA, Maine College of Art and Design), you said something that has stuck with me: sculpture uses its physicality to talk about things that aren’t physical.
TF: I like thinking about the physical alongside the intangible. It’s a contradiction that speaks to the human predicament. My flowers are grounded in the material oppositions of rubber and dirt—something that lasts forever contrasted with a more temporal material. Mary Miss shared that when she made the original Portable Window, movement was key to the concept and execution. Yes, she was engaged in a movement in the art historical sense. Yet, she was also thinking about the meaning of movement in relation to the world around her and outside of art. Miss has often talked about mobility; even walking around is a privilege. As a woman working in the ’70s art world, maybe she knew what it meant to be on the periphery. I think, because of this, she can approach even the simple act of walking through a mindset that potentially accommodates those who are not in the central subject position.
MAR: Thinking deeply about how people comport their bodies to move across space connects to your kinetic experiments, which engage viewers through empathy.
TF: I’m interested in the idea that you’re not separate from an artwork. It should engage you in a way that’s not overly didactic. It’s the opposite of an enormous sculpture plopped in a space demanding attention through its presence. I want a tender exchange. We are not separate from the ecology around us; we are part of it. So much sculpture takes the human out of the equation.
MAR: Many of these ideas coalesced for you around a 2018 research grant to study “More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70s,” a 1996 exhibition at the Rose Art Museum curated by Susan L. Stoops. Can you talk more about what precisely drew you into that?
TF: I’m a stone’s throw from the Rose Art Museum, and though “More than Minimal” happened before I got to campus in 1996, I’ve seen work from that show variously brought out for collection exhibitions. Jackie Winsor, Michelle Stuart, Mary Miss—they have become part of my constitution as an artist and teacher. I felt it was essential to engage further with the curatorial vision of the show. In my research, I interviewed some artists and people intimately involved with it, allowing me to unfold connection paths into my own life and work.
MAR: Where do the lessons you learned in looking at “More than Minimal” appear in your recent work, specifically in the dialogue between work and viewer?
TF: Portable Window got me into a place where the object lent agency to the conversations happening in and around it. I wanted my flowers to have this same sense of agency—to give the audience permission to touch, bend, and interact with them. That eventually manifested in works like Support Flowers, which viewers can carry with them as they walk around the show. I want to help viewers feel like they’re exploring the work more than just looking at it.
MAR: And that is antithetical to the traditional space of Minimalism, where it’s about looking at a piece. Here, you are getting at the idea of being with a piece, an incredibly feminist gesture.
TF: That’s right. I want to expand binary thinking to make things more nuanced. This is important even to the idea of process and how it relates to form; I love the moment you pull something out of a mold and, even though you had all of these controls over process, there’s always a surprise. I wish I were a great craftsperson, but that’s not the level of control I want to exert. Instead, I want to let process deliver form, so that form protests materiality, insisting on the endurance of something dependent on its previous life form. That sums up a feeling for me about being an artist.
When I interviewed Jackie Winsor in the context of my research on “More than Minimalism,” I asked about a statement that Stoops quoted in an essay about my work: “…basically, you make things out of the structure of who you are.” Winsor answered that the structure of who you are changes; you come into this world crawling, and then you walk and grow older. Because you change, you must understand your work from a place of curiosity and evolution.
MAR: That sentiment relates to the state of being that this show and your recent work are trying to communicate. So, if you make things out of the structure of who you are, who are you right now?
TF: Maybe I’m a flower? I’ve been thinking about how casting the fleeting presence of a bloom into metal, a more permanent state, connotes a kind of “coming of age.” It’s an affirmation of beauty in the world. Even though we all experience suffering, making sculpture helps me to affirm moving toward beauty in the end.
“Protest Flowers” is on view at Odd-Kin in East Providence, RI, through September 7, 2025. Fair is currently working on a public sculpture commission for Copley Square in Boston.
