Trefor Prest

He produces highly-finished intricate and puzzling, often humorous, quasi-mechanical or machine-age constructions[1] that are the subject of solo shows in major public and commercial galleries and feature in national and international group exhibitions, including the Mildura Sculpture Triennials.

[10] In 1982 Prest, his wife Belinda, an artist and dance and yoga teacher whom he met at the Gallery School, and their family of three, moved from a hilly rural block Kalorama in the Dandenongs to Sandon in Central Victoria.

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.

[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.

"[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.