Brad Rumbl

My work begins in the geometric forms that arrived during meditation and altered states, when the architecture of consciousness and the mind became briefly, startlingly visible. The Core Device series is my attempt to build that visibility into something permanent. A nine-stage map of how awareness constructs itself from birth to adulthood, from the pre-self fog of early experience through to recursive self-observation, rendered in digital sculpture, large-scale print, and animation. 

I arrived here through survival. Years of reading philosophy and psychology, namely Jung, Robinson and Watts, alongside direct, embodied investigation of consciousness through meditation and psychedelic experience, gave me a framework that formal study later gave language to.

I graduated with a First Class BA in Fine Art from Norwich University of the Arts, but the research began long before that, in the places most people don't talk about publicly.

Before The Core Devices, I built the Grum Reapur, a character, a community, and an unofficial crisis network that eventually reached thousands of people worldwide and helped strangers find each other across continents. That work taught me that art can function as a research instrument and a lifeline simultaneously. Everything I make still operates on that assumption.

I am a recipient of an Arts Council England DYCP grant. I have held residencies at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge and spoken at institutions including Cambridge University, John Moores University Liverpool, and the BFI. I have exhibited internationally, have award winning work and been a finalist at Science Gallery Monterrey. 

My lived experience often forms around my diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder at age 19 in 2009. When I was diagnosed I thought “thats it, I am officially crazy now” and began a descent into madness, despair and suffering, alongside the manifestation of what that suffering can have one do to oneself, without being too graphic with the details. 

At the bottom of that descent was a stint on a ward, where I met people there that taught me about the way that society often treated those with mental health issues. It was in this space where I would come to learn about the full breadth of the spectrum of how mental health conditions can affect people. It was here where I vowed to do whatever it took to overcome my suffering in order to help others. This is where exploration of my own mind, and teaching myself psychology, sociology, philosophy and parts of neuroscience came to change everything.

In this space I found a deep, deep understanding of myself and the human condition, and saw that so many people suffered in their own way, and there may be a way to bring light to the shared emotional experience beneath belief and identity which keeps us so divided. 

I would end up using alot of this knowledge to help people all across the world via my Grum Reapur character and eventually becoming an intensive crisis worker, helping others who were in the same position I once was, and with surprising effect. 

There is a great deal more to this story than a few paragraphs could ever truly capture. But the crux of it, is that I went from suicidal and nihilistic (a condition I see many young men in) and worked on myself to be full of love for life, and finding great meaning within spiritual ideas, but not the dogma that can come with them.