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To go to Eden
A few months ago, we sat at a dark bar watching people disobey traffic laws and wet roads streaked with lights, I listened to her talk about her facial feminisation surgery.
6 weeks on and she was swollen, vulnerable, and hopeful for a different version of the future than what was laid out before her pre-surgery. Without her, I never could have understood in full how an adjustment to the skull was equal to an adjustment to someone’s sense of self – only for her it isn’t only about self-acceptance, it’s about compromising with the perception of others. Meeting opinions half-way, gambling that it will come in to meet her equally.
She listed things that would be different now: To make new friends and have the choice to disclose herself only if and when she knows it’s safe. To go to the servo across the road without the attendant searching for a thread of evidence to justify his assumptions about her body. To go to Eden, not as the snake or the apple.
Historically trans women have been sexualised in private and villainised in public and even in liberation there’s discomfort to be had at the expense of someone, something, somewhere. Through the surgery she absorbs this in exchange for an invitation into the garden of flesh, the garden of human bodies.
Jade is my partner of ten years, documenting her life has become a regular part of my practice. Her transness fascinates me as a subject because transness and queerness exist in the grey areas that inform my understanding of reality, culture and art: One of those things that we weren’t taught and had to learn through feeling and listening. Evidence of the temporality and fictitiousness of prophecy.
Considering orientation (Sara Ahmed), and space - space that is inhabited, and the space that is between you and me (Doreen Massey); to move through space (to have a body, mass, and move through time) is to orient yourself either towards or away from things both physical and not. When it’s self-governed it becomes world building, a tailored existence in which we fill the space that our bodies and souls demand.
In unison we orient ourselves east. Towards an Eden that is both the small fishing town where Jade grew up and where we are building a small life for ourselves, and a place of bodily boundaries where under lore we are othered. To be trans or queer in rural Australia is to forgo the anonymity and protection through community awarded by the city, but it’s also to have faith in people and parts of our culture that we are afraid of.
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.