David Bromley: I close my eyes so I can see

"I'm excited to exhibit with Kelli Lundberg, despite being mostly independent from the gallery scene. My studio is a personal space where diverse works are created, often kept for personal enjoyment. Kelli's passion for my more experimental pieces inspired this show. My work explores the beauty in imperfection, influenced by my mother's craftwork. This exhibition features unique pieces, including repurposed carnival canvas and intricate carvings, showcasing my love for materiality and craftsmanship.

It seems somewhat strange to say that I am looking forward to exhibiting and portraying my work with Kelli Lundberg.

For many years now I have been fairly independent from the gallery scene, only maintaining relationships with a couple of Australian commercial galleries. I have more relationships with galleries overseas as they are further away, and I have less chance of driving them crazy therefore sometimes maintaining longer relationships.

After warning Kelli of working with someone like me, she seemed relatively unperturbed so here we go...Let’s give this one a crack!

Then we went through the studio on a bit of a tour and the studio is a place where a much broader and more diverse body/bodies of work are created and sometimes put aside for predominantly our own enjoyment and my desire to play outside of the artworks that I am more recognised for.

Very few people are allowed in my studio and it’s a very personal space but somehow Kelli managed to get in there and in doing so, was very drawn to some, let’s say, curveball pieces of art.

There is a reason why the pieces she was drawn to remain on the walls of our studio, is because we are incredibly attached to them.

When putting this show together we were pleased that she had a fairly constant leaning, understanding and dare I say, passion for these pieces.

That passion was infectious and I thought it would be nice to exhibit these works with her.

When I say the word curveball, they are not highly different to the work I am more well known for.

But…when I discuss playing in other arenas, this is often my passion for materiality and seeing the beauty in imperfection and my love for craft.

I grew up in a household where my mother did leather work, spinning and weaving and pottery and I was always very surprised in the early stages of my art career in the 80’s that ‘craft’ was a dirty word.

Whereas for me, my memory of my mother spinning wool and us going down to the beach and find seaweed or the bush to find wildflowers and my mother would boil the wool with these foraged flora to get the different colourings.

So to discuss a couple of the pieces…

The striped canvas also bears back many years from my bower bird instincts and in this case, this material I sourced from an old double high-top Australian carnival tent, that I have cut, washed and then stretched over plain stretched canvas.

The carved wooden frames, adorned with my children’s characters, I designed in drawing and they were carved in Indonesia and have been in the studio for over 10 years, awaiting this moment to be seen.

There are 4 simple black and white ‘Gavroche boys’ on bits of timber from an old boat that I just loved their un-uniform shapes and very utilitarian white paint background.

There are a further 4 'pirate boys’ that have really been through a process, planks of timber joined to fit existing found frames…painted 4 times, I poured two-pack clear epoxy on the art thinking the frame would act as a well to hold the resin but instead, the resin bled through, flooded the floor, stuck the paintings to the studio floor for about 4 months….In the meantime, I kept painting and prepping around and sometimes on top of these pirate boys so they got months of overspray, and drips…finally a mate helped me saw underneath with an electric blade to free them from the studio floor. In my mind’s eye, freed better now than when they went down.

I am going to let some of the other pieces speak for themselves.

I started off as a potter (there will be a few of these in the exhibition) in 80’s and so I was sculpting in clay regularly but have always had a passion for bronzes and there are a number of bronzes in this particular exhibition.

They are very much loved by Yuge and myself and at home and in the studio they become almost real and we sometimes have trouble parting with them, but like a lot of this exhibition, it is a matter of finding the balance between holding onto the unique pieces and very few people have seen them, or having your arm twisted by Kelli and letting them be seen."

David Bromley

June 2024