Heide Museum of Modern Art will present the first museum exhibition in Australia of the works of internationally celebrated English-Australian light artist Bruce Munro.

Best known for his interactive, large-scale light installations inspired largely by his interest in shared human experience, Munro will exhibit spectacular indoor and outdoor experiential artworks with intimate story-pieces, revealing the depth of his practice and the breadth of his sources, from the personal and philosophical to the literary and spiritual.

Titled ‘Bruce Munro: From Sunrise Road’, Munro’s exhibition will be situated across Heide’s main galleries and sculpture park, and presented from 25 June – 16 October 2022.

The exhibition will showcase more than 20 key indoor works and an immersive outdoor light installation designed specifically for the site that will activate Heide’s iconic parklands at night. The outdoor installation in the Heide gardens, titled Candent Spring, stems from his celebrated Field of Light at Uluru in Central Australia. At its heart is the stunning work Time and Again, a convex arrangement of abstracted clock faces, or stainless steel waterlilies scored with codes and patterns symbolising past, present, future, infinity, and the speed of light, essentially presenting a translation of time into a visual diagram. Evoking a time machine, the gleaming dome marks time during the day through the passing of clouds and sky, while at night the lilies shimmer like radial starbursts. Cascading optical fibre forms representing large clusters of fireflies come to life at dusk.

Heide Museum of Modern Art director Lesley Harding says, “Heide is delighted to bring the work of Bruce Munro to Melbourne for the first time. The beauty of the natural world, the complexity of the human condition, and the vastness of the cosmos are all brought to bear in an exhibition that is at once playful, contemplative and thought-provoking, offering an unforgettable interactive experience to engage the senses and enrich the mind.”

Heide Museum of Modern Art head curator Kendrah Morgan said, “From a shimmering river constructed from recycled CDs that project coded words of light, to interactive animations evoking kaleidoscopic landscapes and his poetic photography-based images, Munro’s work demonstrates a considered use of site and scale, and materials and technologies that are calibrated to inflect meaning and associations.”

Highlights presented inside the Heide Galleries include the immersive work Ferryman’s Crossing I (2015), which represents the artist’s reflections on Herman Hesse’s 1922 novel, Siddhartha, a story of one man’s spiritual journey of self-discovery during the time of Gautama Buddha. Constructed from recycled CDs, Ferryman’s Crossing I suggests an abstracted luminescent river with a central crossing point. Beams of light are projected across the surface of the work in Morse code, visually mimicking the ‘language’ primarily used by mariners to transmit messages across vast bodies of water.

Time and Place: Sunrise Road 2019, the work from which the exhibition takes its title, is a grid of changing light and colour based on photographic slides that Munro took of the paradisiacal coastal location in Sydney where he first lived in Australia in the 1980s.

“I am delighted that Heide is presenting my first Australian museum exhibition. This unique site offers the ideal environment for my work within the gallery and surrounding parklands. Light is my medium, and a 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 a medium to express abstract concepts such as emotions and connection and I felt an instant connection to the environs of Heide,” Munro said.

Image: Time and Place – Sunrise Road, Australia. © 2021; Bruce Munro

Architecture News & Editorial Desk

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