Building with the most fragile material

New exhibition of Peter Trevelyan’s astounding pencil lead sculpture at City Gallery Wellington

Featuring a sculpture intricately constructed from hundreds of slender pencil leads, Peter Trevelyan’s new exhibition The Light Fantastic is soon to open in the Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington.

This brand new work, a large spherical structure which will be installed at the end of the gallery space, forms the core of The Light Fantastic. Covering approx 6m2 in area, this sculpture will be made up of hundreds of pencil leads painstakingly glued together in small equilateral triangles.
The artist has been incrementally building this structure for many months in the workshop at Massey University Wellington. The many component pieces will be connected together onsite at City Gallery and the final spectacular sculpture will be exhibited in the Hirschfeld Gallery from 25 September to 21 November 2010.

Peter Trevelyan is fascinated by the properties of the equilateral triangle and the history of its use in engineering and architecture. In particular, the artist is interested in the work of American architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). Fuller is famous for popularising the geodesic dome, which, similar to Trevelyan’s work, uses the equilateral triangle as its basic unit of construction.

Following on from the Hirschfeld’s previous exhibition Slowburner: Lisa Munnelly, Trevelyan’s show continues to investigate the conventional artistic practice of drawing and reveals how contemporary artists are pushing this genre in new directions.

Peter Trevelyan is a Wellington-based artist who graduated from Massey University with a Masters of Fine Arts in 2008. His work is well-known to Wellingtonians. He recently exhibited a similar sculpture in a group show at the Adam Art Gallery (The Future is Unwritten, 2009) and last year installed his reflective public artwork Mimetic Brotherhood (commissioned by Wellington Sculpture Trust for the Four Plinths project, 2009) in Te Papa’s forecourt.
 

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