Bruce Gernand
Bruce Gernand was born in America in 1949. He studied at Pennsylvania State University (1966-68), San Francisco State College (1968-70) where he gained a BA in Philosophy, City and Guilds of London Art School (1971-72), the Central School of Art and Design (1972-74) and the Royal College of Art (1975-76). He has received awards from the Arts Council (1977) and Eastern Arts Association (1987), and a Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship (1992-94). Gernand has exhibited his work regularly in Britain since 1982. His sculpture was included in the Osaka Triennale of Sculpture 1995, his first international exhibition.
In scale Bruce Gernand's sculpture relates to the human body, whether as a mask, or a form that you can measure yourself against or encircle with your arms. Gernand is concerned with surface and inner shape, with setting up propositions within his work and dismantling them. He exploits characteristics of the materials and processes he uses, to the extent that material and process have become the subject of his sculptures. Plaster, clay, wax, hardboard, wood and metals including aluminium and bronze have all been the subject of his questioning application. Bruce Gernand professes not to want his work to be easily read, but he does not deny the viewer options. A piece might simultaneously be futuristic and primitive, humorous and sinister, technological and organic, brutish and vulnerable, positive and negative. Having made our choice, we are encouraged to think as the artist does, in the opposite direction.
A visit by Gernand in 1997 to the European Ceramics Work Centre, Holland, to make ceramic sculpture was repeated in 2001 through an Arts and Humanities Research Board award.
Bruce Gernand teaches at Central St Martin's and maintains his studio at Garboldisham in Norfolk.