Bonnie-Jean Whitlock’s work engages with queer perspectives and autobiographical narratives around morality and place, exploring the presentations and symbolism we use to convey our belief systems and inner worlds.

 

Bonnie’s painting practice exists in a sustained state of experimentation, she treats the surface more like a textile than a painting: Folding, beading, dying, and utilising wax and salt to encourage the pigment to dry in interesting ways. Glass beads, wax, salt, flax, oil and pigment all speak to a type of alchemy. For Bonnie, painting is deeply rooted in analogue process and construction. Arranging images around patterns revealed through this dying process, she chases relationships between symbolism in the subjects and meaning pre-baked into the materials, relating fabric to a body and to the stratum of the earth: all vessels embedded and embellished with traces of their world.

 

Born in rural South Australia (1992) and raised in far East Gippsland, Bonnie currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne where she completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 2023 where she was awarded the Evan Lowenstein Arts Management Prize. She has held frequent solo exhibitions in Melbourne and rural Victoria, participated in numerous group exhibitions and has work held in multiple collections including Federation University Collection and private collections internationally.