Tory received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2000 focusing on drawing and mural photography. She spent the next 5 years employed in the industrial screen print and signage industries while co-founding the SS Marie Antoinette art studio and venue. She volunteered to set up the original screen-printing studio at The VERA Project in Seattle in 2003-2005 eventually returning to volunteer in 2010-1016 in their new home at the Seattle Center. She was in the pilot year of Artist Trust’s EDGE program which taught business skills to artists.
She received her MFA focusing on print and paper installation in 2007 from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers. While attending graduate school she was an intern at Dieu Donné in New York assisting the master papermakers. After graduating she participated in an intern exchange at Singapore Tyler Print Institute assisting Ghada Amer produce handmade paper, lithography, screen printed and flocked artist proofs.
After returning to the states Tory worked in signage fabrication in Philadelphia, and started combining the commercial processes and industrial materials that were around her every day in her installations. She interned at the Fabric Workshop and Museum working on the backdrop for Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Ballet Cult of Color: Call to Color. Living in a city steeped in murals and public art made her question the personal fulfillment and short exhibition times of most gallery installation work.
Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest in 2010 Tory transitioned to public works to reach an audience outside of art spaces allowing the work to become an encounter in people’s day to day lives. She rebuilt her portfolio over the next 8 years with temporary installations inspired by folk tales in window spaces in King County. These works were created for Arts-A-Glow festival, Portland Winter Light festival, Bellwether 18, Mad Art, Storefronts Seattle, Storefronts Auburn, The VERA Project, Spaceworks Tacoma and The Renton Arts Commission. She also became a Studio Technician at Cornish College of the Arts in 2010 where she still works in the printmaking studio passing on knowledge gained both from the fine art and commercial print worlds.
In 2012 she received Artist Trust’s GAP grant to procure a Graphtec vinyl plotter which became integral to creating cut vinyl and screen print films for these installations and steeped her in working with computer assisted vector cutting. Tory built out Strychnine Frosting Press with this technology purchase, which grew to include a machine room with a CNC router and laser cutter. During lockdown in 2020 she refinished a 40 year old Cincinnati One Arm vacuum press in her screen print studio. She prints and fabricates for local artists as well as her own work in this space.
In 2014 Tory completed Four Seasons, a year-long window residency at the tutoring center 826 Seattle, which changed every few weeks focusing on four global tales themed to the seasons throughout the year. She designed a workshop for grade school students where the kids wrote their own folk tales and created a series of shadow puppet shows that were performed for the public. For this body of work she received a City Artists project grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and a 4Culture project grant to learn how to produce laser cut puppets. This eventually lead to kinetic toy theaters for various festivals in the PNW as well as the summer long kinetic piece Island / Marshland at Pritchard Beach as part of the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Art in Parks program.
Tory created her first permanent window piece, Fecund, with sibling Eroyn Franklin for Harborview Medical Center in 2015. This piece utilized digital prints on clear vinyl to create a stained glass like glow which imformed other light based projects like the human scale lanterns of Vasilissa the Brave for Burien’s Arts-A-Glow festival, and eventually lead to another collaboration with Eroyn Gather, digitally printed ceramic frit on the platform glass. The duo also made a backlit cut aluminum piece, Pollination and a formliner cement mural that crosses the border of Kent into Federal way behind Mark Twain Elementary called The Universal Language of Play as part of Sound Transit’s Federal Way Extension line at Star Lake light rail station that opens December 6th 2025.
