Style and reception
Prest's work, produced using engineering techniques including forging, turning, riveting, pressing and welding with some woodworking and sewing, [15] and made from scrap iron, brass and copper with some wooden and canvas elements, is mechanical in appearance and structure, though it is based on the human form. [16] [17] [18] His early experiences of the Welsh docks provided inspiration for the machine-like, and sometimes operable, structures he makes. [4] [19] [20] Critic Sasha Grishin responds to the humour in Prest works like Dogger Bank. [21] His work has been described as "mechanically perfect but functionally absurd machines," [22] while Robert Rooney asserts that;
Nothing could be more eccentric than the "scultpures" of Trefor Prest. These structures which look like ancient dental equipment or some other type of torture machine seem to have no reason except to satisfy the sculptor's desire to construct a well-engineered, but useless, contraption. [1]
In 1978, critic John Davies, in reviewing the Seventh Mildura Sculpture Triennial judged "Trefor Prest's Surreal, machine-like Tales from the valley below, exhibited in the Bakery…one of the finest pieces in the Triennial." [23]
In reviewing Prest's 1990 solo show at Pinacotheca gallery in The Age Peter Hill wrote that;
Parts of each work in turn remind the spectator of submarines, sextants, trawlers, farm machinery, pendulums, and 19th Century scientific instruments. They all look purposeful but are in fact functionless, and for that reason fit well with Lothar Romain's views of deconstruction. Romain was one of the selectors of the last Documenta and, as an antipost-modernist, described deconstruction as "a means of setting up a model with the help of construction elements such as ordinary everyday objects. In this model these construction elements are experienced to have no significance at all and have lost their original meaning." By extension, the use of everyday objects can embrace everyday manufacturing processes, fashioning a new artistic revolution from an old industrial revolution. Trefor Prest is one of the best artists in the world at this, along with a few others such as Donald Lipski. Both fashion very different art objects through very similar attitudes to three dimensional construction. [24]
His design for an elaborate ceremonial mace was commissioned by Federation University, Ballarat, in 1995. [25] [26] [27]
In 2014 director Paul Cox in filming his feature Force of Destiny (2015) based on Cox's experience with liver cancer and a liver transplant, [28] [29] used Prest's studio and work to portray the film's hero (David Wenham) as a sculptor. [19] [30]
At auction in 2003 at Christies, Prest's Taffrail Delights (1989) in wood, copper, tin, steel, stainless steel (152 x 65 x 42 cm) was purchased for AUD 4,465.00 beating an estimate of AUD 800 - AUD 1,200 [31]
