Velarde Gallery in Kingsbridge will be showing a selection of works by Bruce Munro, exploring the artist's life-long interrogation of light and how it affects emotions and memory. The pieces selected include two-dimensional works influenced by the artist's long and deep connection to this area of Devon.
Bruce Munro is an artist of international renown with a practice centred on immersive, mass 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.
As a fundraiser for the RNLI, and its 200th anniversary, Munro has donated an iteration of this nocturnal spectacle, a 35,000 square meter massing of 20,000 subtly pulsing light stems along the cliffs opposite Salcombe Harbour.
This mesmerising work can be viewed until January 10 2025.
The works at Velarde Gallery explore 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.
Munro's association with this part of Devon goes back to childhood when he would visit his father during school holidays, roaming the cliffs and sketching in the coves.
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.
"Land, Sea and Sky", three of the most recent works in the Time and Place series, are further explorations of this theme, taking small sections of many landforms, seas and skies from different times and locations to explore a universality of elements.
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.
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.
Three other works on display, Bell Chandelier, Snowball Chandelier and Light Shower are commissions which combine Munro's experiments with lights forms and materials in a dramatic interior setting.
In selecting the works for this exhibition, Munro says he wanted to suggest the sources of inspiration, in nature, philosophy and science that drives 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."
Bruce Munro: Light Creations October 26 to December 28