Gallery 3

Bonnie-Jean Whitlock - Hungry I’ve Fallen

2 - 13 September 2026

please note last day of exhibition ends on 13 September at 3pm

Opening night

4 September | 6 - 8 pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm

ARTIST  STATEMENT 

Lately we spend days suspended between longing and catastrophe, embedded in the landscape pining for a place that doesn’t exist. Unphased by the unprecedented but always just a little uneasy.  

Marvel! How the body holds it all at once.

Some sort of spiritual cavity that contains all your little sparks and wonderings - The things you could never do because of time and money but the little cheers flutter on amongst the anxious misery. The long hours and early mornings and groundhog days despite the deep deep, deep dioxazine purple sadness. Longing for something the way concrete longs for the damp earth and the worms. Grieving an idea and the daily missed justices and off-balance of the whole damn sinking ship. The quiet ache knowing we could be heading right into disaster and the fucking awe and wonder of it all.

The plasticity of us means we’re only the same under the same circumstances, so what happens when the world changes? Corporeality preserves a dormant instinct, or maybe, it’s not too far under the surface.

Are you angry for the bite that sweet animal gave you or can you see the hand that drove it there? The truth that made me ravenous. While those slimy rich cunts crunch on baby birds and the pinky toes of rare mythical beasts that you and I have never even heard of, we plunge into the churning of what the world looks like when it’s uncared for. The un-nurtured pitted against the un-nurtured.

I fall and tumble with it all but this time I fall hungry.

I am a beastie, deranged, and course-haired. Full of meteors and gleaming.

ARTIST  BIOGRAPHY

Bonnie-Jean Whitlock is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist working between painting and installation. Born in rural South Australia (1992) and raised in far East Gippsland, her paintings bear traces of life in the bush under big skies. Underpinned by themes of longing, place, embodiment, and queer perspective, her imagery oscillates between pure fantasy and static representation, mediating between direct narratives and abstract feelings.

Paintings are perpetually built back onto, cut and re-configured. She dyes linen, cotton, muslin and bedsheets with ink and fabric dyes, incorporating salt and wax to create reactive patterns which she then paints into. Unprimed fabric and the occasional incorporation of beading lean the paintings to being read as textiles. 

For Bonnie, painting is deeply rooted to analogue processes of building and making. Working in a sustained state of inquiry, each piece is a negotiation between intention and response in collaboration with materials. In ‘My body is full of meteors’, Bonnie begins by tracing around herself onto the fabric, a body map that the dyeing process constantly refers back to and that the painting process selectively recovers. In others, projected images of stock photos, personal photos and classical paintings are the underdrawing, impressions of this process are left in traced digital icons and screen prompts. The porosity of raw fabric retains evidence of its own making - a geological quality that speaks to the accumulation of layers within the earth and within a body.   

Bonnie currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. She completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 2023 where she was awarded the Lowensteins Arts Management Prize. Earlier this year, she was shortlisted for the 2026 Midsumma Art Award, was awarded the Red Salon Art Prize at Red Gallery’s Inaugural Art Prize and received an Honourable Mention at Brunswick Street Gallery 2026 Small Works Prize. She has had solo exhibitions throughout Melbourne and rural Victoria and participated in multiple group exhibitions. Her work is held in private collections locally and internationally, including the Federation University permanent collection.