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| tender (6), 2010 |
My series tender (2010) and my piece The Opening (2013) are being shown in the inaugural Goa International Photo Festival as part of the show 'Portraits from an Island'
From the catalogue:
Andrew Bruce’s work, Tender, comes from a very different starting point to most of the other artists in this exhibition, these are self- portraits with dead animals, all road kill. The young male body, almost translucent, seems fragile and strong at the same time. Holding crushed sometimes bleeding animal bodies Bruce seems to be heroizing these dead bodies, asking us (human beings) what we have done and why. These are ironic images about life, death and the misadventure of human progress. The motor-car, our own proud invention, responsible for all these killings. Bruce appears to be gently delivering these bodies, comforting them as if his gestures could redeem us somehow. For Tender Bruce was still working in series’ since then he has developed a different way of working, he no longer works on groups of pictures but instead on single images. The Opening was one of the first single images and it links to Tender. In The Opening Bruce has moved on from deliverance and appears to be taking his road kill into a dark abyss reminiscent of the mysterious blackness that the hunters chase their prey into in Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest.
