Event date: 30 April 2025
Review by Selwyn Taylor
Bruce Gernand’s studio is in the grounds of The Old Manor on the outskirts of Garboldisham in Suffolk.
Thirty ncas members visited Bruce on a wonderful warm, late spring day and were made most welcome in his sprawling home, studio and garden containing Bruce’s working studio and an outer building housing his archive of past projects.
Bruce originally studied philosophy during the political upheavals of the late 60s in San Francisco. He moved to England to study sculpture, blending the formative intersection of American minimalism and the more lyrical sculptural references practiced in Britain.
Bruce became interested in the potential of digital imaging. For some years his work has negotiated and searched for a relation between the digital and material. Using 3D computer modelling and transferring this data into material form has been a challenge rife with welcome conundrums and paradoxes.
During his time as a Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins, Bruce undertook an AHRC funded project, Coded Chimera (2011), which explored the transformation grids of D’Arcy Thompson in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and the Computer Lab at Cambridge University. The convergence of zoological form and computational strategies was guided by a rather un-scientific and poetic concept: the chimera, a composite which makes a link with a long tradition in art where unfamiliar conjunctions act as repositories of our own imaginative projections.
Bruce Gernand with ncas member
ncas would like to thank Bruce for a wonderful tour through his philosophy and resulting work.