Tom Gormally's recent work includes large site specific outdoor sculpture installations, room-size indoor sculpture installations, and gallery scale sculpture pieces, as well as paintings and-drawings. Each body of work is distinguished by a different scale and use of material and-processes, yet each informs the other by a unity of ideas. The largest outdoor installations have the closest connection to architectural ideas and structure.

The sculptures are sometimes scaled up household objects, sometimes organic forms juxtaposed with architectonic structures. They are massively sized installations, fabricated and placed in the environment in such a way as to highlight the artist's intent. A lightness of being combines with elements of absurdity, tragedy, black humor, and satire. The piece entitled, Life's A Picnic is a 12 foothigh, 24 foot long picnic table tossed on its side on the lawn, along with one of its attendant benches, as if the summer (or picnic) has come to an abrupt end. The second bench, upright and 5 foot high, transforms many adults into delighted children sitting high up on the bench, legs dangling, viewing the disrupted scene before them. Life's A Picnic was installed at the former Sand Point Naval Base, Seattle, for the Horsehead International Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition.

In another piece, an 18 foot tall chair leans lazily back against the brick facade of a building on the river front, its front legs suspended 5 feet in the air. The attitude of the chair, along with its Watching the River Flow, is in tense opposition to the tragedy of the social circumstances of its environment. The river front on which the sculpture is sited is the Lagan River, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

A second body of work is comprised of room size sculpture installations, almost like stage sets. For these interior settings, fabricated, furniture like elements are set in delicate contrast to massive biomorphic forms.The furniture elements are crafted with finished woods of cedar, oak, poplar, and fir, often in grid- like structures. The biomorphic forms are carved from whole blocks of wood or constructed in lapstrake fashion from thin strips of cedar and oak. These forms suggest the figure in ways that are absurd, humorous, and sometimes otherworldly.

These room size installations, as well as other sculptures, draw on the idea of the Tree of Life, referencing the mythology of multiple cultures. Story and myth, an inferred narrative that reflects on the human condition, informs all the artist's bodies of work.

The genesis of the newest body of work, Portals, explores the visual similarities and the deeper connections between the microscopic world and the unseen world revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Portal sculptures reference both the forms of   telescopes and   microscopes and the similarities in the shapes in the worlds they reveal.

The Portal sculptures explore the realm between the visible and the unseen world, between the ethereal and the real; these sculptures hover in space above the floor, yet command the room they inhabit. The flocking adds a color element and a dense, light absorbent surface. While absorbing light, the Portals pull the viewer in as well.

The paintings and drawings make use of layering and multiple media, often suspending sculptural forms in an ethereal, abstracted environment reminiscent of stars in the sky, cells in plasma, or protozoan in the sea. These works were inspired by the study of DNA and genetics. The humorous twist in the quirkiness of the drawn forms contrast with the delicately painted background, a reminder of the frailty of the human and natural world.