British artist Bruce Munro first visited Darwin in 1992 and ended up spending several years living in Australia. He is perhaps best known for his Field of Light installation created at the foot of Uluru, more than 50,000 slender forms crowned with reflective discs that created a shimmering mass over an area the size of nine football fields.
Munro has just unveiled his latest project Tropical Light, eight new and reimagined light sculptures across Darwin’s CBD and Waterfront foreshore (Nov 2019 – April 2020).
The project comes in the wake of Sensorio, another light field that Munro installed in California’s Wine Country in May (USA), presented over a 15-acre field; while his project Light Art Flash on Jeju Island, South Korea has been extended due to popular demand. These is also an exhibition at Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina (USA), in April 2020, and then Munro mounts the exhibition Time & Place, which will transform a Thirteenth Century barn and surrounding landscape in Wiltshire (UK) opening 6 December.
Simply, his is an ambitious international career that would challenge any artist half Munro’s age. He told ArtsHub that it took a while to learn how to manage career fatigue.
ArtsHub caught up with the highly celebrated artist, now in his 60s, to learn the wisdom of working in a public space, and the role that audiences and community play in creating a destination project.
ArtsHub: How vital is a long-track relationship with a place when you are making site-responsive artworks?
Bruce Munro: It is the experience you have that impacts a piece – the lived experience when you visit places. My most recent work is literally figuring out ways to record light – chroma clouds that surround us from moment to moment; an emotion is created by the place you are in, and if you can capture that, it is like a fingerprint.
AH: What does ‘research’ look like these days? And how do you find those connections that make a project sincere?
BM: There is always research, but it is mostly the emotional connection. I read a book called Coral Island when I was about seven, and I remember that very first moment when I thought I have to go to that place with palm trees.
We then went on a family holiday to Wales and I kept expecting this great blue sky and palm trees to appear out of nowhere. I learnt from that experience never to second-guess a place.
In a more general way, I have always collected memory. I log my memories in my sketchbooks and when I flip open one years later, I get an aroma off that. These pieces [for Darwin] are finding little memories or visual anecdotes that evoke a sort of feeling.
I use art to feel that I am alive.
Bruce Munro
AH: What is your advice to someone wanting to work in public spaces, especially at scale?
BM: I have an incredibly good team. I hate finances so I have someone do that, to make sure the contracts are right and that I don’t get taken advantage of. It is good to have someone working with you who is good at dealing with government departments – there is a lot of red tape in the world today.
AH: In some ways, your work is only half done in the conception and installation phase. It is the audience engagement with the work that really completes it. How do you work that ‘physicality’ into your making?
BM: It is like the cake becomes whole when people come to see it – there are all these different slices that make up the cake, but it is really only finalised by the audience.
It just shows how relevant we are to each other; we can’t exist in isolation, and that is an important conversation I want to share.
Read: Review ofTropical Light
BM: I want to be responsible environmentally, but the work is really based on human emotion – how one feels when one is alive. It is about imagination; it is about process; it is about bringing people together to make things.
I am more interested in how my work can be a medium – a melting pot for people to communicate. Today we lack this ability to talk to each other, without being argumentative or backstabbing.
AH: Several of these sculptures in Darwin have been realised before. How do you manage to keep your practice fresh and the narrative relevant while also keeping it sustainable?
BM: Every Field of Light installation is different because of the landscape it inhabits. These installations are ephemeral, a collection of repeated materials created by many hands – a bit like theatre
For Darwin, the plastic used in the sculptures will be recycled back to raw materials to make a legacy and gifted back to the city, to kickstart this whole idea that Tropical Light goes forward.
AH: How do you manage to seamlessly juggle an international career and the stresses and fatigue that come with it?
BM: As a younger person I buffered anxiety, brushed it off, but I have learnt how to deal with it. It is simple really – I keep fit and I meditate. I love doing that.
AH: When you are working in a public space, how important it is to get scale right?
BM: If you are going to choose a big landscape you have to get the scale right. But it is not about size; [for me] it is about trying to get people to feel lost in it. You can be clever and give illusion that it is bigger than it is
That word immersive is awful. For me it is something else, for example, when I went to Uluru I had the feeling that the land gave off this energy; that space just wants to make you jump up and down. So I had to make something coming out of the ground – a field of light – it was not about being immersive.
Bruce Munro: Tropical Light is showing across Darwin CBD, November 2019 – April 2020.
The writer travelled to Darwin as a guest of Tourism NT.
