Rope, stone, balance, heart. These are amongst the tools that David Bruce uses to construct his world—a lush, animate internal microcosm that, lucky for us, manifests from time to time as installation, painting, or vessel. Last year’s show at Plant Zero, “i : Exposition of Self,” cast a collection of natural materials throughout the space’s halls; about a ton of painstakingly hung round stones, some bound together in groups with sinew, some nestled alone in stretching bodies of fabric, made for a quiet, tactile thrill. David’s work is deeply tied to the space in which it’s viewed. “When I walk into a space, I start collecting my thoughts and writing down what I see and imagine… I gather ideas like little corpuscles of air, make them into material decisions. Then I bring my materials to the space and allow all those first thoughts to get pushed into my subconscious… sometimes the process is as intriguing as the finished work,” he smiles, and relates how he found himself hanging by one arm from a ceiling beam during the creation of the “i” show, stretching rope and hauling up 36-pound rocks.

Not that that’s unusual for him. A decade ago, after a brief taste of climbing on a little wall in Kitty Hawk, he started regularly attaching himself to the rock face as a way to stay grounded and connected to the outdoors. “While I was climbing, I thought of nothing else. The stone was sucking up all those things in my mind that didn’t need to be there.” Throughout college at ECU and a post-college stint of work in Asheville, he climbed, made paintings on old plates of glass, and let the mountains do their work on his spirit. Next up was a glassblowing workshop in Newport News, where he fell in love with a material for the first time, and finally, it led him to VCU for glass and ceramics. “I was working towards finding myself, being myself. I realized that glass wasn’t the only material I was interested in—other materials communicated other feelings, like notes on a scale. I need these things to feel alive… it’s a language I’ve built for myself.”

Currently, David directs exhibitions at Plant Zero. As his own work goes, big installations have been his style recently, though he still does a lot with glass and ceramics, and commission work comes his way, too. He’s got a show coming up in late September at Mayer Fine Art in Norfolk, but if you need immediate gratification, check out his Web site (davidbrucestudios.com) or his blog (davidbrucestudios.blogspot.com), where he takes down meticulous process-oriented notes that somehow manage to read like poetry (okay, and some of it is actual poetry). “My work changes, but I have roots from it, like little landmarks in my mind… they provide a way for me to wayfind, to figure out who I am by walking through my memories.” Or climbing, as it were.

WEB | http://www.davidbrucestudios.com