Artist’s Talk: Bruce Munro

Artist’s Talk: Bruce Munro

Discovery Green is proud to host Field of Light, a dazzling art installation by internationally-acclaimed artist Bruce Munro. The vivid, temporary, site specific installation will be exhibited along the Brown Promenade from Nov. 22, 2014 – Feb. 8, 2015 and will be illuminated at dusk until 11 p.m. daily. Munro’s installation is the first to be selected by Discovery Green Conservancy’s newly-established fine art committee, comprised of community experts dedicated to bringing the best internationally-recognized fine art to Discovery Green. Chosen for his creative use of light, Munro also shares the park’s commitment to using recycled materials in unexpected ways.

Munro will give an Artists’s Talk on Saturday, November 22 at 1 pm at DiverseWorks.

About the Art

Munro originally conceived the idea for Field of Light in 1992 during a trip through the red desert of central Australia, when he sketched a landscape of illuminated stems that would wait like dormant seeds in a dry desert, to bloom at night. The idea remained in his sketchbook until 2004, when he finally had space and resources to execute it. It has since been specifically re-imagined for sites across the globe. The Discovery Green Field of Light comprises 4,500 radiant, frosted glass spheres atop slender stems connected by illuminated fiber optic. The spheres and stems wait quietly until dusk and then bloom with gentle rhythms of colored light as darkness falls over the park.

About the Artist

Born in 1959, Bruce Munro completed a B.A. in Fine Arts at Bristol Polytechnic, England. Shortly thereafter he moved to Sydney, where he learned about design and lighting, inspired by Australia’s natural light and landscape. Returning to Southwest England in 1992, he settled in Wiltshire. He and his wife Serena have 4 children. His work has been exhibited by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Waddesdon Manor, the de Rothschild Foundation, 
Buckinghamshire; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.  In 2015 he will exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Garden and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Bruce Munro is noted for his immersive site-specific installations that employ light to evoke emotional response, often in an outdoor context and on a monumental scale. His practice is a mediation of memory and of moments of shared human connection, and incorporates a fascination for components and an inventive urge for reuse.