Small Machines for Big Minds

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Stella Downer Fine Art, Waterloo

by Andrew Frost

Over the course of his career Trevor Weekes has been fascinated by the paradox of animals, using them as metaphors for the way we view the natural world, and by extension, our own places within it. The animal as a subject for art can be an odd mixture of representation and veneration but Weekes avoids the cold precision of a scientific drawing or sappy New Age sentimentality for a measured and observational accuracy.

Where recent bodies of work have tended to concentrate on playful compositions accentuating contrasts between the natural and the man made – his last show with Stella Downer in 2013 put animal subjects in landscapes suited to Surrealist narratives – Small Machines for Big Minds is an entirely different proposition. Using drawings, painting and bronze sculpture, Weekes has created blueprints and scale models of machines that use animals as their central working mechanism – an elephant driven contraption, a device for floating a whale or protecting a rhino, a machine that would give a bird extra speed. Like much of the artist’s work there’s humour here, but tempered by a serious question – what is nature for?