Born in Te Aroha in 1967, Bronwyn Gayle earned a Diploma of Craft Design from Christchurch Polytechnic in 1994. Moving to Dunedin in 1995, she studied at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art earning a Diploma of Ceramic Design (1995), a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts (2019) and a Master of Fine Arts, with distinction (2022).
Bronwyn works in ceramics with cast glass and re-imagined found items. Her ceramics are created using a smoke firing process that is an amalgam of historical and contemporary experimental techniques. Each clay piece is individually wrapped in combustibles and then coated in clay slip and paper to form a saggar container. After drying, these are fired in a gas kiln before the saggars are broken open to reveal the pieces inside. The finished works are no longer pristine but marked and coloured by smoke and fire, bearing the scars of their making.
In many of her works, Bronwyn combines the saggar-fired ceramic pieces with re-imagined found items and glass that she casts. “By casting glass, we capture it in its molten form. It is akin to setting glass traps and waiting, sometimes for weeks, to find out what you have captured.”