Bolster, first used custom tapestries to create a room sized installation for an exhibition in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2018. The imagery he uses to make these works comes from video footage filmed at specific locations, which he then manipulates on a computer, recently he has been replacing all of the original colors or digitally painting into the beta images. These layers of digital technology are then transformed into the analogue technologies of warp and weft to create jacquard tapestries, which are physical approximations of his digital files. In both sewn together and stretched as canvases, he works with these pictures to fashion a version of the image which can include the embellishment of embroidered text and pictorial elements as well as the removal of threads from the body of the tapestry. These methodologies of translation and transformation form the core of Bolster’s practice embraces science and science fiction simultaneously questioning political and mythological belief systems.  

Drawing from his time on the residency program at SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute) where he was in conversation with eminent scientists, he developed the hypothesis of a planet which was identical to our planet Earth except for the fact it has two suns. This world Kepler 16b was similarly reaching out across the galaxy to make contact, the images received were both wonderous but perplexingly familiar. Sometimes embellished with declarative but ambiguous statements and phrases written by the artist, these messages from elsewhere serve as warnings of man’s fallibility. Recently he has traveled to some of the contested National Parks at the southern boarders of America to gather images that similarly speak of wonder, while asking questions of our relationship and responsibility to the planet we inhabit.