19 February–3 March, 2001

Iconoclastic artist Jerry Pethick has had a long-standing interest in optical phenomena and technological processes, collapsing the boundaries between art and science. His practice, at its essence, juxtaposes ideas of illusion and materiality. As art critic Robin Laurence writes, “Solidity and emptiness, volume and flatness, opacity and transparency, perception and distortion, picture scale and experiential scale, beauty and banality, nature and culture, all are tossed together in our physical encounters with his art.”

Since the early 1960s Pethick has been concerned with virtual space as a sculptural medium, dematerializing physical mass and exploring the resulting implications for sculpture. Regularly employing both anti-technological and technological materials such as bottles, hand-blown glass, plastics, lightbulbs, mirrors, lenticular and Fresnel lenses, image projecting devices, photographs as well as more traditional sculptural elements such as wood and metals both made and found, Pethick's use of recycled materials inspires dual readings between environmental interests and complex metaphors for visual perception. A constant tension in his work inspires relationships of opposites and complementaries, instigating a friction-fraught dialogue.

Informed by extensive research of past, present and future work, Pethick mines these researched avenues in his current installation at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Trough, distilling his practice's main themes down into their essential elements. The installation isolates five main formal elements (the materials used are wood, plastic, clay, anodized aluminum and sandblasted aluminum) through a reductive process, yielding a method which represents a renewed manner of working and thinking for Pethick. Working through illusions of the natural environment (seascape, forestscape, mountainscape, perhaps even industrial and technological landscapes), Pethick's Trough examines these concepts via their essential materials, giving the viewer an elemental vision of such representation.