Terry's current practice and research stems from his interest in the way the activity of painting can be mutated and transformed using processes and methods that have been initiated and examined by other means, i.e. new technology, photography, film and video. He wants, through his work, to transcend a narrow doctrinaire approach to painting and engage in a practice that is negotiated as part of a pluralistic activity - not reinforcing a traditional position of painting but exposing problems of that tradition, posing questions about the physical and emotional activity of painting as well as what is painted.
The exploration of the materiality of painting is central to his work: how paint and other materials can be charged with significance and power by mere manipulation and placing, how these configurations of materials are read in relation to each other, to art history and to the ‘real’ but mediated world. It explores the relationship between painting and photography; painting and form; painting and physicality. The questions posed continually in the work refer to the notion of image/material as ‘fact’, more particularly the idea that nothing can be categoric when it is continually mediated by other images, things, places and events. He is intrigued and stimulated by the process and materials of painting itself and the way painting is negotiated as a credible practice at the beginning of the twenty first century.
