Henry Bruce.
Experimentist or Artist?
It is not that Henry Bruce does this because he sees himself as an 'Artist' of any particular sect, but that his natural curiosity and his attempts to deconstruct and re-design everything around him, in order to find more understanding for himself, makes him so.
He has a deep animalistic affiliation with nature, recognising its grandness, its imperfect perfection; and its antidote - the machine, technology and all its elements. His materials - metal and plastic jiving against wood and bone - describe the harsh and imposing feelings these represent, playing on their similarly natural origins and birthplace. Resurrecting bones, bought to life in sculpture, he questions the balance between life & death, love & hate, organic & manmade, growth & destruction. Henry Bruce is reaching to fathom such extremes of the spectrum to gain a deeper understanding of his own mortality and fantasy. His fetish to peep inside the workings of lust and evolution, nurture and damage, culminates in this body of heartfelt work.
His daily walk between the two beasts, nature and technology, impregnating one with the other, examining the destruction of nature to make it more aesthetically pleasing, more humanly palatable, is what Bruce kicks against. Once known as "the boy of few words", and not without his own inner battles, this work pinpoints just a few of the places his argumentative imagination has lead him.
Show to run: Wednesday 24th November - Sunday 13th December '09
