Person of Interest: Tyler Thrasher

My memory is hazy, but I’m pretty sure I screamed the first time I saw one of Tyler Thrasher’s crystalized cicadas. It was gorgeous. The bug’s body was completely engulfed with hunks of vibrant purple crystal, and its lacy wings shimmered with delicate shards of stone. It looked like something you’d see flying around planet Thra. 

I wasn’t the only one mesmerized. Soon after debuting them on Instagram, Thrasher began to post the sparkling insects for sale on his website, and they sold out within minutes every single time. (I’ll get you one day, cicada!)

Thrasher first got into crystalization in college, when his interest in chemistry and mineralogy collided. After some experimentation resulted in successfully growing synthetic crystals on rocks, he was inspired to go a step further.

“It hit me. I can grow crystals on anything—what if I grew crystals on a dead bug?” he says. “So I found a cicada shell in our backyard and put it in a crystal solution. I woke up the next morning and the crystals had exploded out the back of the cicada shell, and it was, hands down, the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. It completely changed the trajectory of my art. It changed my definition of what art could be. It taught me that science and art cohabitate. It really changed everything for me.”

Over the years, Thrasher has crystalized scorpions, snail shells, butterflies, stick bugs, snake skeletons, and mummified baby chameleons, and recently he’s moved on to opalization. Now, more than 423,000 people follow his scientific experiments on Instagram, where he’s developed a knack for explaining complex theories in easy-to-understand ways without sounding condescending.

His newest way to incite excitement in STEM is his book, The Universe in 100 Colors, which he co-authored with his friend and fellow scientist Terry Mudge. It’s part science book, part nature book, part educational book, and part art book. In it, Thrasher and Mudge explain how some of the universe’s more captivating colors came to exist. From polar bear fur to chalkboard green to Pompaeian Red (which may not have been red at all, actually!).

With Thrasher and Mudge coming to Town Hall Seattle on Thursday, October 3, I couldn’t resist an opportunity to ask Thrasher how the hell he ended up building a fascinating career out of making dead shit beautiful.

I’ve seen you crystalize everything from cicadas to snakes to dragonflies. Is there anything you tried to crystalize that turned out to be a flop? 

There are lots of things. I’ve tried crystalizing different skulls and things like that, and they don’t always work. A lot of surfaces that are too smooth won’t allow crystals to nucleate, so they just kind of fall off of the object. That was a learning curve. I had to learn that the more texture to the surface, the better the crystal nucleation is.

Growing opal on an object is a different process than growing crystal, because it’s a different structure. When did you start opalizing objects?

I had put out in the world that I’m the guy who grows crystals on dead things. [Laughs] Lots of people on the internet showed me this photo of a crab claw that was opalized. It’s this bright electric blue/cyan blue crab claw that looks like a magical artifact out of a video game. It blew my mind. 

I began this deep dive into opal synthesis, synthetic opal, and photonic crystals. It took about three years of tinkering before I started to nail down how you go about opalizing an object. I learned a lot about nanostructures, nanoparticles, and different processes like the Stöber method for growing opals. I learned a lot about light diffraction and Bragg’s law of diffraction, and this is where my love of color comes in. Opals are, as I call them, masters of color—they essentially take white light, and they show you that this is spectral blue, this is spectral red, this is the red that’s in white light. 

Once you grow your first opal, I mean, it blows your mind. I was like “Holy shit, I made a crystal that tells a story about the universe and tells a story about photons.”

Was it like that scene in Castaway when he makes fire? Did you physically scream, like “I did it! I am God!”

I did, I screamed. I ran around the lab screaming, yeah.

So that obviously strengthened your relationship with color. How did that love of color turn into your book, The Universe in 100 Colors?

It’s pretty simple, I grew an opal and I realized, “Oh my god, I understand color.” And it blew my mind. And then I started thinking, “Wow, I understand color, but how well do I understand color?” I started looking at pigments and different dyes and colors that are human-made and colors that are cosmic, and eventually, I ended up with a really cool list of interesting colors. I hit up my friend Terry Mudge, and we just did a deep dive to find what we believe to be 100 colors that are fun to explain. There are so many colors in there that a lot of people have heard of, but they may not know how those colors work. I wanted a color book that’s gonna blow people’s minds and educate them. Opal was the bridge to me sharing my love of color with the world. 

Is it even worth asking you if you have a favorite color? Is that even answerable? 

[Laughs] I think I can more easily answer colors that I don’t like. I’m not a fan of oranges. I find orange to be an obnoxious, abrasive color. It takes up a little too much room on the visible spectrum. [Laughs] This is a personal critique of the visible light spectrum. If I stepped into a room that was painted all orange, I’d be very agitated. 

You referred to yourself as the guy who grows crystals on dead things, but experimentation and science, especially when it’s done with organic matter—bugs, bones, and remains—can feel really macabre or crude. I feel like all of your experiments are reframing these things to be lovely and pretty. 

I’ve had my work described as macabre before. What’s been really funny—I think when you work with dead things, dead remains, people kind of picture you a certain way. As I was starting out, I think a lot of people thought I was gonna be this broody, gothy person. It caught a lot of people off guard when I started putting my presence on the internet. 

I don’t think I’d describe my work as macabre. For me, it’s simply collaborating with nature. I know people think it’s macabre, or they say I’m giving death a second chance or honoring something that has died in a beautiful way. That’s not my goal. For me, my goal is experimentation and collaborating in nature and using natural objects to tell a story, to build a world. I certainly think parts are beautiful. But it’s just me dancing with nature and making stuff. I don’t know how it will turn out, so I’m just trying to surprise myself and keep myself fascinated.

Tyler Thrasher and Terry Mudge will speak at Town Hall Seattle on Thursday, October 3.