Artist Bruce Munro’s breathtaking installations have wowed crowds from California wine country to Australia’s famed Uluru, and now East Coast aficionados will have a chance to take in the show.
Opening 8 April and running through 12 September, a show titled Bruce Munro at Brookgreen: Southern Light will illuminate the grounds of Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina – the only place in the southeastern US to catch the artist’s highly-Instagrammable work this year.
Featuring seven pieces – both light-based and mixed-media – created just for the botanic garden’s various habitats, the immersive exhibit will boast thousands of moving parts, including 11,700 dandelion-like glowing bulbs for the artist’s iconic Field of Light, ensconced here at the arboretum.
Versions of the mixed-media installation have popped up around the world since its debut at Uluru in 2016, everywhere from South Korea, Denmark, and the UK to Houston, Nashville, and Columbus, Ohio.
“Field of Light was one idea that landed in my sketchbook and kept on nagging at me to be done,” he said in 2017. “I saw in my mind a landscape of illuminated stems that, like dormant seeds in a dry desert, quietly wait until darkness falls, under a blazing blanket of southern stars, to bloom with gentle rhythms of light.”
Other pieces will include Okonjima Choral Society – 2000 ‘frogs’ singing on the terrace – and Water-Towers, ten towers near the garden’s welcome center and its allegorical Visionaries sculpture, strung with fiber optics and wired for sound. Over in Oak Allée, the artist’s Fireflies – 600 sprigs created from copper tubing and optical fiber – will make an appearance.
“My site visit reinforced the notion of a garden being made up from a series of interconnected outside rooms,” Munro said in a statement. “It also left me with an impression that the ‘garden rooms,’ populated by figurative sculptures, were surrounded by an untamed landscape. It’s a magical place with an edge of the unknown!” For tickets and more information, visit brookgreen.org.
