Byron Shire
Bruce has been a self employed artist/craftsman since about 1974, and makes his living from sculpture, jewellery, traditional blacksmithing, knife making, foundry casting, utensil making, and all things metal and stone.
Bruce is the founder and manager of the metal and jewellery collective, Hammer and Hand, in the Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart Tasmania and the Arts Precinct, Bangalow, NSW, since 1994.
Bruce makes things and always has. Some are sculptures that convey something of what he understands of the world, some are frivolous and a mystery to himself.
He claims to have “left a great big pile of wrought metal in his wake, some that has pleased him, some that has pleased others and some neither or both”.
He is beholden to metal, it is his music and his sustenance. He describe the world with it and in return it has offered him an identity.
Bruce has said… “I am a metal-smith for this short and incandescent life… and then I will leave it and this wrought self, ….happily transforming to subtler muse”.
Byron Shire
