This episode of A Creative Excuse begins with a puppet. Sherbert, a multicolored, long-armed creature in a Ziggy Stardust shirt, sat on a shelf in Kara's studio for months until Thais Mather's daughter found him at Frank's birthday party and carried him home. After catching up on his travels, Thais asks the question that ends up running through the whole conversation: why does someone make puppets like that at all?
It turns out to be a question she's been living with. "I think that I've burnt out for the first time ever as an artist recently," she says, and she's been thinking back to the young, broke years when the hunger to share work and be in community drove everything. Midlife, in her view, offers a way back. "You actually go back to that angsty part of yourself, but you have resources and you have community," she says. "It's not a crisis. It's actually just you're going back to that time where you were such a true believer in the things that you loved."
Thais comes by true belief honestly. Born and raised in Santa Fe, she grew up inside her parents' folk art world, spending more time with artists like Felipe Archuleta than with the objects themselves. The family moved to Oaxaca when she was three months old, her grandparents following because they thought her parents were insane, and she remembers being terrified of Alonso Jiménez's howling coyotes, which are now her favorite animal. Her parents arrived in New Mexico with nothing, her dad working as a guard at the penitentiary and her mom in the cafeteria at the ski basin, and she describes them as people with "such modest ambitions" who were, above all, "true believers."
Trained as a printmaker, with a master's in other art forms, Thais came to painting on her own, drawn in "because of the materials themselves." Miss Universe brings that curiosity to bear on femininity, creation myths, and cosmic mothers, and on "being really vilified by your own creation." The women in these works are galactic and chopped up, mismatched against a cosmic floral aesthetic that she describes as "really beautiful, and they're extraordinarily creepy." She grew up fascinated by pageantry without ever presenting that way, and the title carries both that girlhood longing and the bleakness of space, including the billionaire fantasy of escaping to Mars when "we have this incredible planet." The repetition of printmaking, making thousands of objects, feels to her like a way of threading together something scattered, "always grasping, always wanting to know, like, where is she?"
What surprised her most about this body of work was finishing it at a hard time in her life, finding she could "put one foot in front of the other and wake up and brush my teeth and like exist. And maybe that's part of space, right? This is just this massive bang, and here we all are."
The conversation also wanders through Dolly Parton, a childhood wish list that included becoming Jem and appearing on Star Search, and the loneliness of years spent working in the studio with no one to reflect the work back. Through all of it Thais keeps returning to the town that raised her, which she calls the best place to be an artist and hopes stays strange. "I just want it to remain weird," she says, and after an hour and a half with her, you'll want the same.