Viewing room

This winter we proudly present a selection of works by British/Australian artist Bruce Munro, which explore his life-long interrogation of light and how it affects emotions and memory. The exhibition includes two-dimensional works influenced by Munro’s long connection to this area of Devon, and runs alongside his spectacular light installation Salcombe Field of Light, marking the RNLI’s 200th anniversary, on show opposite Salcombe Harbour until the 10th January 2025.

Bruce Munro is an internationally recognised artist with a practice centred on immersive light-based installations, often in locations of outstanding beauty. His works have been exhibited across the world and are currently on long-term display in California, Japan and Australia, including his best-known work, Field of Light, at Uluru in Australia’s red centre. His association with South Devon goes back to childhood, when he would visit his father during school holidays, roaming the cliffs and sketching in the coves. Munro’s ongoing practice, which is largely inspired by his interest in shared human experience, originates in the ideas he records in his sketchbooks, a habit that has continued from boyhood and throughout his life. By this means he has captured his responses to stimuli such as music, literature, science and the world around him, for reference, reflection, and as subject matter. The resulting works include both monumental artworks as well as intimate story-pieces.

The collection here at Velarde explores his 2-D experiments in abstraction, through lens-based wall hangings and smaller 3-D light installations. They centre on fleeting moments of connectivity and the great patterns of nature, phenomena we can sense but which remain elusive. In selecting works for this exhibition, Munro expresses the sources of inspiration in nature, philosophy and science that drive his practice, whether on an intimate or massive scale. It is also a thank you to this corner of Devon and a meditation on the importance of place. He says: “After 60 years, I feel like I’m coming home.”

Time and Place

The wall mounted pieces include Munro’s Time and Place series, which seeks to distil the emotional essence associated with specific images by taking a suite of photographs in a 360-degree arc and transforming them into a series of dots of pure colour. The resulting circles of graded hues are both a reminder of the original images and a route towards meditating on the emotions associated with them. The profits from Salcombe - Time and Place will be donated to the breast cancer charity, Primrose Foundation.

C-Scales

The C-Scales series involves an exploration of binary codes and musical notation, and Silent Boogie Woogie is another contemplation of abstraction and distillation, originating in a childhood fascination with photographic transparencies and the Lilliputian frozen world contained within the small vividly coloured squares.

Field of Light - Salcombe

Field of Light was originally conceived in 1992 during a trip through central Australia. The very first version was sown in the field behind Munro's home in England in 2004. Since then, it has appeared for short spans of time in locations across the world, always different, an organic piece that has stretched across fields, along city parks and through forested land. The profits from this piece, Field of Light - Salcombe will be donated to the RNLI.

Regatta

Regatta is a continuation of Munro's interest in transposing language, memory and feelings into a visual format. This has developed to experimenting with distilling experience by writing haiku. On a recent trip to his old home of Salcombe, Munro was reminded of the joy he felt watching the sailing boats in the esturay during Regatta week. The haiku is simply an expression of joy and revealed as a continuous bow wave that appears and disappears as three hulls race through the swells of the estuary.

Fireflies

The largest of the light installations in this exhibition, Fireflies, is a meandering stream of light, a series of 91 fibre-optic shower sculptures inspired by two works of fiction; Kim by Rudyard Kipling and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, both of which feature rivers as metaphors for the spiritual and physical journey of all living creatures.