Bruce Woods is a Australian contemporary visual artist best known for his personal interpretations of places of personal significance. His educational background includes undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Newcastle College of Advanced Education and has been awarded a Master of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong.
"My practice is characterised by an interest in place and the representation of landscape as a site of memory."
The way that he works follows a pattern of a thesis followed by a rigorous development of a body of work on paper and larger paintings, all conceptually and visually linked. His works explore ideas of a landscape being multi-layered with surfaces infiltrated by personal memory, intuitive responses and cultural connection.Each sequence of works begins its journey as serial works on paper, using charcoal and chalk, water colour or sumi (Japanese ink) which slowly evolve into oil paintings. Sizes vary from the very small, intimate pieces to much larger works.
In his current and ongoing project, “Fields of Stone”, he is exploring the Monaro High country, the Snowy Mountains and the boulder strewn plains and hills around Berridale, Dalgetty and Jindabyne. This is a landscape with a significant place in his memory. In “Fields of Stone” the subject of rocks and stones strewn across the wind and frost blasted paddocks become a representational vehicle for binaries such as presence – absence, past – present, permanence – transience.
His practice is informed by his lifelong interest in eastern philosophy and art, particularly Japanese and Chinese philosophy. This is most obvious in his referencing Zen calligraphy in his stylistic concerns, but also in the brevity and economy of his mark making. Woods sees the landscape as being a liminal space which allows for an experience of some kind of immanent presence. Another way of saying this is that the landscape represents, simultaneously, an inner, personal world and the exterior, observed world. The “Fields of Stone” project, as in other projects over the past 20 years, is an investigation into the interplay between transience and permanence, the role of memory and the cognition of the present, all as a way of coming into a full relationship with the world.
Bruce Woods lives and works on Gundungura Country in Mittagong, NSW.