Art & Technology #10: Bruce Munro

Munro was trained as a painter, but upon graduating, found himself manufacturing display signs in Australia. Eight years later, Munro returned to England to realize his true dream. Looking back on his time in Australia, the artist states it was during this period that he was able to develop the discipline in terms of form and content that allowed him to express the ideas that filled his head. In 1992, just before moving back to the United Kingdom, the artist journeyed through the Simpson Desert in Central Australia, where he felt a compelling connection to the energy present in the landscape. The Field of Light series is an embodiment of that experience. Munro saw the changes in the desert before and after a rainstorm, and the effect it had on life there. He saw the contrasts between day and night. All that he saw and felt, he channeled and expressed as a field of blooming luminescence. After Field of Light’s first public showing at the V&A Museum in 2004, the desert-inspired work was presented at different spaces the same year, including a 15,000-bloom iteration in the Long Knoll Field.

Munro’s visual representation of light’s movement was reiterated in his 2012 Waterlilies at the Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. It was around this time the artist began to reach beyond his own memories, introducing allusions and references from novels, films and music. The “waterlilies” of the installation were made of CDs adhered to circular foam bases, kept afloat in reference to the skillfully cultivated Victoria amazonica lilies most famously recognized in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV and C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The large-scale installation and its fascinating show of light drew much attention to the artist’s employment of visual elements, but his works have always been connected to diverse narratives. Light is the form that reaches the eye, but within it lays the artist’s thoughtful consideration of music, science, literature and his affection for people. Munro’s works have become even more progressive as of late, exploring the idea of capturing language through light. The artist has stated that the current experimentations of his Language and Light series are influenced by Whanki Kim (1913-1974), a pioneering abstract artist from Korea. Munro discovered Kim early last year and found a particular resonance with his works from New York between 1963 and 1974. The dots and lines found in Kim’s paintings sowed the ideas of musical notation and binary code, and as those concepts took root, Munro found himself working with Morse code in his art. Through the visualized projection of light as dots and lines, the artist explores works that create visual beauty for some and semantic significance for others.
Munro will exhibit mostly in the United States this year, and is slated to present at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art this October and the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix this November. We can only wait to see what fantastic lightscapes he will show us next. ■ with ARTINPOST

Born in London in 1959, Bruce Munro completed the Foundation in Art & Design course at Braintree College before moving to Bristol Polytechnic where he majored in fine arts. He moved to Australia in the 1980s where he worked in the lighting design industry, and returned to the U.K. in 1992 and settled in West Wiltshire. His artistic interests gravitate toward large-scale outdoor installation works that feature light as a medium. Since his first solo exhibition in 2008 at Eden Project in Cornwall, the artist has held many more presentations, including at the Holburne Museum, the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art in the United States, and the Hermitage Museum and Gardens. He has participated in group exhibitions at the V&A Museum and the Guggenheim. In 2013, Munro was recognized by the American Alliance of Museums Excellence with an Excellence in Exhibition Award.