Bruce Connew
Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa

Bruce Connew is an artist and photographer whose practice moves between image and book form, shaped through decades of independent inquiry. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, and at times Paris, his work resists fixed methodology—emerging instead through accumulation, intuition, and the slow gathering of meaning.

Largely self-taught, Connew has presented major solo exhibitions across Aotearoa since the 1970s. Alongside this, the artist book has become a central site of practice—an evolving structure through which ideas are tested, revisited, and held. Works such as Body of Work, folded eggs, and A Vocabulary trace an ongoing internal dialogue, where image, language, and form remain in active exchange.

His approach is neither linear nor resolved. It begins with fragments—“an assortment of simmering propositions”—and unfolds through pursuit, assembling evidence into something provisional yet precise.

Through Vapour Momenta Books, a self-publishing platform developed with artist Catherine Griffiths, Connew extends this thinking into making and distribution. Here, the artist book is not a container but an object in its own right—where material, typography, and sequence are integral to the work’s meaning.

Across print, publication, and archive, Connew’s practice remains open-ended—continually reconfigured through reflection, process, and return.