Teo Treloar

Teo Treloar prefers drawing with graphite as it is elemental and cosmological. Its carbon composition was born in the stars and supernovas, and is an essential element for all life on earth. Treloar is fascinated by the idea that you can make art with something that is contained in all living things.

Teo Treloar was twenty-six when he decided to apply to Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), the University of Sydney. He graduated with a bachelor of visual arts (first class honours), followed by a master of visual arts in 2006.

His experience of education up to that point was awful. Being dyslexic, he struggled with traditional methods of learning, particularly in high school where he dropped out at sixteen years of age. At that time the public school system wasn’t set up to deal with people like him, but he never stopped drawing. It was his way of escaping the intense anxiety that he experienced during school and his apparent continual failure in that system.

After leaving school at sixteen, Treloar applied to East Sydney Technical College but was rejected because of his age. He then worked in a variety of jobs over the years. In his early twenties he tried graphic design but failed that as well. His teacher was unsympathetic about his dyslexia. He would mix up left and right, place things on the wrong side of the page, and draw lower case b’s and d’s the wrong way around because he couldn’t tell them apart. He still can’t. Even more unforgiveable was his left-handedness. He would inadvertently drag his hand across the page and smudge the ink when doing art projects as he was forbidden to make the work from right to left. This was “hands on” graphic design before digitalisation. After that experience he pretty much gave up on higher education.

It was while he was dating a “diabolically clever” woman, Elenka Haigh, who urged him to apply to university, that he put together a portfolio for the interview admission process at SCA. It took him several years to have the courage to apply as a mature age student, and he was fortunate to be interviewed by the painter Debra Dawes. She could see he was terrified but was very encouraging, taking the time to tease out why he wished to enrol in art school.

Treloar was offered a place for the following year, and finally entered the tertiary education system in 2000. The first few years at SCA were hard as he struggled with writing essays for art history and theory courses. However, Haigh patiently checked his essays, and one of his supervisors, Brad Buckley, spent a lot of time helping him navigate his way, enabling Treloar to push through. Eventually things started working out for him. His experience of education started shifting from something that was terrifying and keeping him up at night with severe anxiety, to a force that was “so empowering I started to see how it was improving my life.” Ending up in his current position of lecturer in painting and drawing at the University of Wollongong was beyond his imagination when he was younger. His experience has made him a strong advocate for creative arts education, and he recognises that “for those who are outsiders and struggle with fitting in, having an art school experience can be truly transformative.”

Treloar’s interest in the ideas of the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus and Czech writer and poet Franz Kafka permeate his work, with his first reading of Kafka’s The Trial, 1925, in his early thirties, being a profound experience. He was struck by both the imaginative world Kafka crafted and the narrative constructed around the character Joseph K, an individual trapped and destroyed by the incomprehensible labyrinthine bureaucratic world he inhabits. Both Camus and Kafka place the human experience at the centre of what they do. And even though this focus doesn’t represent the breadth of vicissitudes, Treloar still finds value in it. In a sense it represents our futile search for meaning in a universe that doesn’t care if we are here or not. Treloar uses this idea of a white-collar “everyman” regularly in his work. Even though he is wearing a tie and looks the part, it’s not going to help him. He’s like the middle person of history that you will never know but whose life is unfolding with the logic of a bad dream.

The scale of Treloar’s drawings belie the extensive labour necessary to produce them. The larger drawings can take 400–500 hours to be realised. They are intimate and intensely focused on the ideas percolating within them. He draws from right to left, with no sketching or mapping beforehand, or going back once started.

Treloar is often asked if his creative process is meditative, which it isn’t; in fact he speaks about the work as problem solving. The subject of the drawings is often a male archetype, particularly of the sort represented in the books he references in his work—he acknowledges that, ultimately, his creations are “autobiographical portraits of my own psychological states.” He’s also motivated to improve his technique: “refining my craft is something that I am really invested in.”

He prefers to work with graphite pencils. His very early works were made with biros and ink pens, but now his tools are pared-back to just Palomino Blackwing pencils and some mechanical pencils. “Drawing is immediate; the only thing between the paper and the work you want to make is a pencil.” This is unlike painting where you might work over multiple surfaces before the paint is transferred to a canvas. He finds drawing “akin to writing and authorship, where each mark drawn holds a specific meaning that is important.”

Treloar has two distinct approaches to art making: one is a more illustrative style of drawing while the other is non-objective drawing that focuses on surface and materiality.

In his work for The National, 2019, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the darker, non-objective drawings were installed between his more pictorial drawings, giving a greater intensity and focus to the mark making.

He works iteratively. When creating a series he’ll start off with a set of principles and ideas, he then makes a single drawing that informs the next drawing, and so on. He explores traditional illustrative ideas, like using narrative formats such as a comic strip, but is compelled by the idea of a Möbius strip and sees his work largely functioning in that vein.

Treloar is currently preparing a new body of work for a solo exhibition at OLSEN Gallery in Sydney, opening in August. He’s experimenting with AI image generation to create reference images for his drawings. The DALL.E2 program is an early generation AI engine, generally not used nowadays, but it creates interesting images because they’re not perfect. “For this body of work, I’m using sentences, words and narrative structures from Kafka’s The Trial, inserting them into the AI image generator, then using the images produced to create hand-drawn analogue works. This is just an approach to try and see what happens with the use of that technology, and how AI artifacts can be translated with the hand-drawn process. It’s intriguing to see how it interprets ideas from the book.”

He describes his work as “the amalgamation of different ideas and interests, from cosmology to Kafka, so it’s never about one thing.” He doesn’t want his work translated literally for the viewer and as with the Möbius strip there’s no instant comprehension regarding what you think Treloar’s work means. Sometimes “there isn’t an explanation for everything.” If you think you’re on the inside you could be on the outside. Images can be linked but lines that seem to be leading somewhere aren’t. People should just spend some time looking at the drawings.

Exhibition
Teo Treloar: A Void A Maze
5 April – 29 June 2025
Wollongong Art Gallery

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 68, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artist, OLSEN Gallery, Sydney, and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney