Bruce Rowe

Bruce Rowe — 'November 4', Ceramic Relief, 2025

$8,000

 

 

DONE/UNDONE 
Curated by Joseph Gardner

VISIONARIES 2025:
Presenting the future of Australian art, craft and design through the lens of the country's most influential creatives.

'November 4' and 'November 5' form part of an ongoing series of ceramic reliefs framed within shelves, box frames, and containers. I see them as documentation; a record of the here and now shaped by a personal symbolic language. My practice explores thresholds and transitions, the spaces between the known and unknown, seen and unseen. I work with natural rhythms, material, symbol and colour to give form to what resists definition.

The making process is a conversation between intention and intuition. I divide a clay slab into a grid and work left to right, top to bottom, cutting and shaping without pre-planning. Much like writing, marks emerge in response to what comes before, each decision shaping the next. Unlike a written text however, the forms resist translation; they can’t be deciphered, repeated, or reconstructed. What is captured is shaped by the conditions and the moment of its making, always in flux and shifting from one work to the next.After firing, framing gathers the ceramic fragments and holds them as an integrated whole.

Each frame is calibrated to its ceramic counterpart, aligning in colour, scale, and depth. The relationship between collection and containment is deliberate; adjacencies, alignments, and the spaces between hold as much weight as the forms themselves


Bruce Rowe (b. 1971, Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia) is an artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. He works across sculpture, fibre and drawing and has exhibited in Australia and the US. Rowe’s practice explores his lived experience through an engagement with time, material and process. Structured, repetitive forms such as stairs, masks and boundaries run throughout his work, which examines the often-contradictory nature of these typologies and the liminal spaces between them.

Rowe is the co-founder and creative director of Anchor, a design studio established in 2012 to experiment with clay and to bring imagination and creative thinking to ceramic processes. At Anchor, he leads an interdisciplinary team and a structured research program exploring circularity in ceramic production, waste-stream mining and non-traditional making methods.


DONE/UNDONE 

14 November 2025 - 7 February 2026

Joseph Gardner is the 2025 Visionaries curator – presenting Craft's largest exhibition to date: showcasing 50+ artists and 400+ artworks.

Featuring artists across medium, scale and level of experience, they represent the exceptional level of rising talent in Australia.

DONE/UNDONE explores the creative process as a space of constant negotiation — a series of decisions to build, erase, repeat, or let be. It’s about that intuitive moment when a maker chooses to pause, to push further, or to dismantle entirely. These are the choices that define the rhythm of making — choices familiar to artists, designers, and creators across disciplines.

Joseph Gardner is the Style Editor at Vogue Living, with a decade of experience in publishing and styling, and the founder of Sydney-based gallery, Studio Gardner. 

Discover more

 

Material: BR clay, stained timber

Dimensions: approx. 65 x 83 x 5.5cm - framed size

 

Please note: purchased works are to be collected at the conclusion of the exhibition (7 February 2026).

Shipping costs may be estimates. Please contact us via shop@craft.org.au and we will be available to provide an Art Courier quote or shipping costs for larger items.

1 piece in stock.

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