Trevor Mathison is a founder member of Black Audio Film Collective, the award-winning documentary film group (Handsworth Songs, The March). He formed Dubmorphology with Gary Stewart in 2005. Culture critic Kodwo Eshun has hailed Mathison’s pioneering use of tape loops for their ability to make “the imperial anxieties of the early twentieth century resonate… with the multiple fears of the present.”
From Signal to Decay is an ongoing and iterative research project into artist, musician, composer, sound designer and recordist Trevor Mathison’s rich and varied body of work. This exhibition, Volume 3, presents a set of 15 drawings made using graphite alongside a sound piece. In each of the drawings, Mathison began by scraping a graphite cube across the paper and spreading out its particles, in order to pick up the variations in the paper. As the artist and composer has himself commented, this process suggests a parallel with his approach to sound and his work with granular synthesizers, which allow him ‘to take one small element of sound and by breaking it down, find numerous textures within it.’ Each drawing could be said to be the ‘equivalent to a single tone, shimmering like a visual wall of sound. A still, frozen note held in suspension.’ This focused exhibition builds on Mathison’s first solo exhibition in the UK, From Signal to Decay: Volume 1, staged at Goldsmiths CCA, and Volume 2, his first solo album.
Curated by Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Oliver Fuke.

