Bruce Reynolds

This work is part of Curatorial+Co.'s 2026 group exhibition, 'The Beast In Me'.

Of all the internal mechanisms that drive us, perhaps the most primordial is the beast. We expel the animal, the bodily, the base in favour of the intellect, yet it is the beast that holds what is most irreducibly human—impulses and desires that precede thought: love, rage, care, protection, connection. The very thing we suppress is also the thing that touches what is most vital.

Bruce Reynolds’ works evolve from considerations of migration and the transcontinental passage of ideas via vessels and other objects. They reflect on the shockwaves of history that resonate into this century, fusing the intimate with the monumental and the archaeological with recent experience. History is registered as residue rather than illustration.

Casting and relief permit surface to behave as a generative force rather than a final skin. Reynolds imagines the beastly as a state where self-conscious intellect is overwritten.

Architectural and figurative associations emerge gradually where industrial pattern meets hand-carved surfaces. Characterised by the slippage between two and three dimensions, the works bypass the digital and hold the viewer at the threshold of recognition.