Bruce Rowe - About

Portrait: Peter Ryle

My work is personal, made with the primary intention to explore and document my lived, human experience. I have focused on making works about presence, for we exist here, now, and nowhere else. It has taken me many years of making and reflection to build connections between the works I have made. It is through the slow, and at times difficult process of making works, that I have come to understand their meaning.

My practice encompasses drawing, ceramics and sculpture. A language of structured forms; stairs, fences, masks, walls and boundaries, run throughout my practice. Works examine the often-contradictory nature of these symbolic archetypes and the threshold or liminal spaces that exists between the contradictions. They reference my lived, felt and sensed understanding of passage, refuge, protection and defence.

The physical act of making plays a central role in my process. Works are made through a dialogue between drawing, physical effort, time and material. Drawing connects the imagined with the corporeal. The act of making and the time it takes to do so creates a tangible space in my process that I have found necessary for the work to become concrete. Both planned and intuitive action is present. I typically make work in solitude. I use ceramic, timber, plaster and a host of secondary or support materials to make work. Sometimes these materials are used in their raw state and at other times a surface is applied. I take an agnostic approach to methodology, process and material; nothing is ‘better’ than anything else, but everything has meaning.

Bruce Rowe

Exhibitions & Collections

Exhibitions & Collections

Press