Bruce Reynolds

About the work

It is the material substance of the work that synthesizes image and object, whether decorative or functional.

 

Relief reaches into the viewer’s physical space. Its ancient and persistent condition, asks us to remember our place; usually before a building that seeks gravitas by linking the past to our time. The further we are from the Parthenon, from Persepolis, the more tenuous the authority of relief.  In the distant Burrup Peninsular lies the apex example of this form, where unresolved past and future collides. The oldest and most prolific set of relief petroglyphs threaten to be overwritten with the mechanisms of global consumption. From afar, the abstract determination of their fate reminds us of the diminished roles of physically worked material, of perception.

Pictures in stone speak in an old dialect scented with authority and credibility; like truffles or bergamot. We walk away from an encounter with a heightened sense of our own other reality, as one does after a holiday or a movie.

 

The origins of struggle are lost in the beginnings of physical play, warfare and religion. Competition and the urge to display prowess and agility feed forms of struggle that serve to enact the stories of our species. Simultaneously they parallel a puppy chasing its tale.

About the artist

Bruce Reynolds is Brisbane based artist who grew up in Canberra, whose migrant background is English and Nigerian. he studied painting in Canberra and Melbourne and have lectured at several Australian art schools in painting, photography, sculpture and design.

 

Trips to China, Bangladesh, Rome and Malta pursued the historic migration of ideas and forms that continue to link Europe and Asia. his sculptural practice and interest in relief has been pursued in the studios of The British School at Rome and in doctoral research

using its materiality to evoke a dialogue between recent and his personal histories with the archaic.

Bruce’s debt to Canberra is a formative combination of idealism and skepticism and a continuing curiosity about human intervention in the landscape; about design and history.