Susan Knight & Trevor Mein

There is so much our eyes don’t register because of the speed at which events unfold or because the objects in question are in a state of flux… Sometimes it takes an artist to show us what is in front of us by capturing the most nebulous or fleeting of phenomena and helping us to see them anew. This is what Trevor Mein does with his photographs of motion and energy, as glimpsed in the movement of a horse or the fleeting formation of a cloud.

Mein was raised on an Australian farm where the wide, brown terrain triggered an empathy with the vastness of the Australian landscape and the infinite theatre of the sky. For over 20 years Mein has captured this immediately familiar yet hauntingly beautiful aspect of our world which he then presents on a scale that is respectful of the magnitude of his subject.

Mein’s dressage photographs, in collaboration with artist and equestrian, Susan Knight, break down the moment of poise and movement and capture its subliminal mood. Horse and rider are abstracted into parts of a whole, all of which heighten the sensation of movement and the subtle geometry of the horse itself.

Knight’s fascination with the cyanotype began in her father’s architectural office where she first saw engineering blueprints, their intense cyan and technical precision becoming the trigger for her exploration of the horse bit’s evolution and design. The x-ray effect of the blueprints imbues the image with a kind of purity, a ghostly quality that lifts it to another realm. The gleaming stainless steel bits with their joints and rings and shanks create tantalizing geometric patterns suggesting interlinked, stick-figure outlines of bodies united in a common purpose, like rider and horse.