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Artist Biography
Bonnie-Jean’s work functions to explore queer perspectives and autobiographical narratives around morality and place. It exists in a sustained state of experimentation and repetition: Revisiting her childhood home to mine for context and memories, photographing her partner to document her transition, and tracing parts of her body and photographs.
She treats the surface more like a textile than a painting: Folding, beading, and dyeing it with ink. Rubbing wax into areas to create resists and using salt to encourage the pigment to dry in interesting ways. Glass, wax, salt, flax, cotton, oil, water and pigment all speak to a type of alchemy. For Bonnie, painting is deeply rooted in a fixation with analogue process and construction. She chases relationships between the subject, symbolism and materials: Following patterns made through the dying process, arranging images to emphasise them and embellishing parts of the narrative she wants to romanticise.
She relates fabric to a body and to the stratum of the earth, all vessels that bare traces of their lives, all that have a penetrable surface layer, and all fixed to a path of least resistance. An ongoing practice grants permission to spend time in these material and conceptual indulgences. In a culture so hell bent on productivity and action, that can be difficult to do without guilt, so paintings make it tangible.
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock was raised in Far East Gippsland; she currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. She completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 2023 and was a recipient of the Evan Lowenstein Arts Management Prize.