Past Exhibition

The poet and essayist Francis Ponge wrote a series of prose-poems on invertebrates; the oyster, mollusk, snail, shellfish and butterfly, each one ‘siding’ with a shell or cocoon. Ponge notes: “Somehow I wish that man sculpted kennels, or shells, of one sort or another, things on his own scale, that he created objects differing greatly from his own mollusk shape but proportioned to it."¹ He compared the (seemingly) effortless harmony that arises between these invertebrates and their shell/cocoon coverings to people’s own surrounding structures which, to him, were out of step with their personal scales, limits and imaginings.

The kinds of human-made surrounding structures Ponge describes include typical domestic rooms and houses. For Cooper, the repeated experience of moving from house to house throughout his childhood has become bound up in both memories and objects. These are bodily sensations felt when encountering certain material reminders; forming threads between memories held and shaped in the mind, and by the sensory experience of everyday things and built environments.

Trevella grounds her paintings in atmospheric and environmental elements she inhabits day to day. From there, imagined and found narratives emerge - animal figures that are blended and multiple, plantlife that seems other worldly. One painting to the next can contain recurring imagery and the brush and mark-making movements of past works. Through these processes, the cohabiting forms of creatures that emerge do so as a shelter, dwelling or refuge is shaped about them.

Memory is often characterised as a dwelling place, somewhere to abide or linger for a time where the past and present merge. Something akin to a shell, cocoon, husk or nest constructed about a person or persons. A place made through collecting material and immaterial things.