Born in rural South Australia (1992) and raised in far East Gippsland, Bonnie’s densely populated, surreal paintings bear trace of life off grid in Australia, referencing the bushland, the landscape and inherited habits of collecting and repurposing.

 

Her experimental practice engages with queer perspectives and autobiographical narratives around morality, subjectivity, and the body within place. Through abstraction and distortion, mirroring, and portraiture, she explores presentations and symbolism used in our daily lives that convey belief systems and hidden inner worlds.

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Working in a sustained state of investigation and play, she treats the surface more like a textile than a painting: Folding, beading, dying, and utilising wax and salt to create unique patterns in the pigment that guide her compositions.  Glass beads, wax, salt, flax, oil and pigment all speak to a type of alchemy. For Bonnie, painting is deeply rooted in analogue process. In the age of flawlessness and oversaturation, she heralds the tactile and a bodily relationship to constructing artworks; treating them as vessels that carry ideas through from autobiography into conversations around morality and belief systems, inner and outer worlds, and queer perspectives.

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Bonnie currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, in 2023 she completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT and was awarded the Lowenstein’s Arts Management Prize. She received an honourable mention at Brunswick Street Gallery’s 2026 small works prize, as well as the Red Salon Prize at Red Gallery’s 2026 inaugural art prize, and is currently shortlisted in the 2026 Midsumma Art Prize. She has held solo exhibitions in commercial and artist run galleries throughout Melbourne and rural Victoria, participated in numerous group exhibitions, and has work held in Federation University’s permanent collection and private collections locally and internationally.