2019 press release/artist statement from the exhibition Trevor you're moving in all directions.

 

9 years ago in a studio on Coldhabour Lane more akin to a mausoleum with its dust and memories seldom unsettled. A Viennese gentleman arrived during a winter weekend – wearing a cowboy hat for a “sitting”. The results of his commission were tentatively outlined and, despite my anxiety to please, I soon discovered were negotiable.

 

The experience of the sitting was akin to a examination, of which my efforts at drawing were but a fragment of a brittle whole prone to dissipation, this self-appointed physician – the Viennese gentleman in the cowboy hat – sought to some extent to unite and encourage. “Trevor you're moving in all directions” was a gentle rebuke during one of the sittings in which he seldom sat and seldom was silent. Where we differed was distilled in this rebuke that has stuck, echoed in my thoughts since and became something of a credo for my work.

 

The 15 works on display at the Torriano Meeting House were a fresh departure, that began for me last April. Restricted to the same size rectangles of archival board, the work demonstrates the co-opting of that rebuke into an all over aesthetic. I think of the work as pictures of a imagined insular zone, in which stockpiled marks, shapes and patterns are in a constant churn. With parts repeating, transgressing and collapsing, they're malevolently changeable puzzles, whose pieces were momentarily wrestled under control.