Unnatural Nature

INTERVIEW:
BRUCE MUNRO
Internationally renowned British artist
Bruce Munro will open Light, an exhibition
of 10 breathtaking, large-scale outdoor
and indoor lighting installations
coupled with indoor sculptures, at Nashville’s
Cheekwood Botanical Garden &
Museum of Art. The exhibit will include
four installations never before seen in the
U.S. Using an inventive array of materials
and hundreds of miles of glowing
optical fiber, Munro will transform
Cheekwood’s magnificent gardens, manicured
grounds and rolling hills into an
enchanting, iridescent landscape that
emerges organically at nightfall. Aesthetica
spoke to Bruce on his latest exhibition
and what to look out for in the
future.
A: Firstly, your art practice is centred on
light, what is it about light that you feel
drawn to use as your focal medium?
BM: It took me a number of years to
come to this conclusion and once I had
made my decision to work with light I
stayed with it. Choosing a medium was
incredibly helpful as it gave me a structure
to work within. I have quite a wide
ranging imagination and this containment
has allowed me to retrace my steps
when I have ended up a blind alley! One
beautiful quality of light is that it captures
the ephemeral. This illusive, seemingly
no physical quality has a spiritual
essence about it and makes it ideal as
medium to use to express abstract concepts
such as emotion and connection.
A: Your work is centred around light
installations within natural landscapes
and iconic buildings. Where do you draw
your inspiration from for such large scale
projects?
BM: Working with large scale landscapes
and buildings was very much
“wishful thinking,” I never imagined that
I would get the opportunity to realise
many of my ideas. The inspiration, and
the ideas that follow, are changing constantly
and vary in scale, medium and
longevity. For example , Field of Light
was inspired during a journey through
the Australian Outback; Water towers
was inspired by a book that I read when
I was twenty one and CDsea by a Sunday
afternoon sitting on a rocky peninsular
in Sydney Harbour. As I get older I
am inspired and drawn to simple things.
I endeavour to express these experiences
in the same way.
A: You work with both light sculpture
and installations – do these varied mediums
perform different roles in the narrative
of your work?
BM: I do not have a set approach so I
would say that all pieces; small and large
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