Charles Trevelyan was born in 1974 in Australia. With a material science and engineering background, Trevelyan navigated a gradual transition to the arts. Developing a style of work that references a diverse spectrum of influences, Trevelyan explores the natural textures and colours that he remembers from his upbringing in Australia, cellular and crystalline morphology that emerged through his investigations in his early career in science, and more recently, the intriguing patterns in aerial photographs resulting from unintentional interactions between industrial and agricultural land usage and natural landforms.
Eschewing traditional methods due to his unusual path into making, Trevelyan embraces material and process exploration to develop furniture, lighting and design objects inspired by the varying ways in which people respond to the textures, colours and structures of the natural world. He's interested in the manner in which small fluctuations shape our perception of form and the inferences we draw and seeks resonance points on continuums of variation where an object can transition from unbalanced or awkward to graceful through a process of incremental alterations in a given characteristic. With each creation, he seeks a balance between ambiguity and familiarity, interlinking form, colour and texture to provoke curiosity in the observer.
Mostly favouring physical models and prototypes over sketching, Trevelyan alternates between material experimentation and making with each aspect feeding back into the other in an incremental developmental process that is deliberately detached from any notion of a final destination or function. The new works in Trevelyan’s Gyre series, presented for the first time at DM25, combine a careful study of sculptural form with an intensive process of experimentation to develop a unique colour and texture that mimics Australia’s natural environment.
