Thomas and Dan met in 2001 at the University of Tennessee where DeZarn attended graduate school and Sturgill was a sculpture major. They found that their work had certain conceptual similarities and that they were interested in many of the same ideas. The two worked well together, and in 2003, in addition to pursuing their own work, they started producing large scale collaborative pieces under the name Pulled Resources. Dan and Thomas realized that they could construct impressively large and labor-intensive projects in relatively short periods of time and with fairly modest budgets when they worked together