Biography

Bonita Ely’s first exhibition was in London in 1972, but recognition of her artwork in Australia effectively started at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial of 1975, where she exhibited a close and complex examination of Mount Feathertop, a location in the Victorian Alpine region that tested the tensions between observation and interpretation in visual representation.

Her interdisciplinary installation, C20th Mythological Beasts: at Home with the Locust People (1975) had its beginnings in New York where Bonita Ely lived from 1973 to 1975. Sunset Video’s poignant sound, composed by Mark Freedman, and images of working boats on the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty, the shore line of New Jersey all shrouded in pollution, drew the viewer into the installation’s spatiality as an active participant rather than passive observer.

This corporeal engagement of the viewer characterises Ely’s practice.

Exhibited in institutions such as Chisenhale Gallery, London, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Harbourfront, Toronto, and the 18th Street Arts Centre, Los Angeles, USA, Documenta14, Athens and Kassel, Germany, Venice, Italy, Bonita Ely’s experimental artwork is in international collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and has been selected for significant contemporary art events such as Fieldwork, the opening of the Ian Potter Centre for Australian Art, Federation Square, Melbourne, and Documenta14 in Kassel, Germany and Athens in 2017.

She has produced three public sculptures for the City of Hue, Vietnam (1998, 2002, 2006), Sydney Olympic Park (2010 - 2012), and Broken Hill (2012).

Bonita Ely’s performances of the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s explore our relationships to the natural environment, other species, and each other, such as the cultural clashes surrounding Aboriginal Land Rights enacted in Jabiluka UO2 (1979). Womanhood and pregnancy are celebrated in her performances, Breadline (1980), Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1982), and A Mother Shows Her Daughter to the Universe (1982).

Examinations of complex environmental issues using the device of invented personas, for example the cheerful cooking demonstrator performing Murray River Punch (1979, 1980) plus Murray River Punch The C21st Dip in response to the Millennium Drought (2010), and the celebratory iteration, Murray River Punch: The Soup, with Emma Price (2014); the methodical secretary photocopying an exponentially degenerating photograph of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder in Controlled Atmosphere (1983), addressing the threat to dam the Franklyn River in Tasmania .

Her personas as pregnant mother-to-be Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1982), and the woofing, howling, yapping, barking, whining Professor performing Dogwoman Makes History, (1983) explore our anthropomorphised fascination with another species alongside the gendered construction of history, using images of contemporary dogs, and dogs depicted in the multicultural art and artefacts of Berlin museums documented whilst artist in residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 1981, 82, and 1985.

During the 1990s she drew attention to genetic engineering and climate change. Her snabbits, half snail/half rabbit, raised in agribusiness regimes, become a feral monoculture embattled in the extremes of global warming in the series of paintings and installations, We Live to be Surprised (1989 – 92). Current iterations demonstrating the installation’s ongoing relevance have been exhibited in the survey exhibition, From the Kitchen Table: Drew Gallery Projects 1984-90; Folkstone, UK; Southwark Park Galleries - Dilston Gallery, London, UK; Griffith University Museum, Brisbane, 2019.

Installations such as Histories (1992), “1968” (1997), sited in Sydney’s colonial residence, Elizabeth Bay House, and Inside Mawson’s Sleeping Bag: the Poetics of Heroism (2000), interrogate our cultural histories at the interface of ontology and systems of knowledge. For example, the latter expounds the courage expressed in Aboriginal oral histories of the children of the Stolen Generations, as they struggled with fear, depredation, alienation, loneliness. Their courage is aliened with that of Australia’s archetypal hero, Sir Douglas Mawson.

Her exhibition, World Wild Life Documentary at Performance Space, Sydney (2006), was an installation of works on paper and video. Produced over thirty years the artworks take the viewer behind an eagle eye, a curious mind, an obsessive collector and recorder of imagery, transformation and culture. For example, Chinese brush and ink paintings spontaneously capture the artist’s imaginative responses over a period of twelve years to a singular place on the South Coast of New South Wales, Bithry Inlet. For example, Southerly captures the South Coast’s stiff breeze straight off the Antarctic whereas Manning Clark’s Brain was executed mid morning when the bushland, drenched in direct clear sunlight, each eucalypt tonally set against its shadow, conjured the late Manning Clark’s brain thinking thinking about Australia over the inlet in his family holiday shack … Videos accompany these works on paper as equivalent time based mediums. Video-ed frozen time, real time, and time lapse bare witness to the daily metamorphosis of a particular natural environment.

A narrative video, Wild Life Documentary, composed of a bricollage of ten years’ footage of natural phenomena and cultural indices alludes to the intimacy of the human/animal, intent on social interaction, and significantly, a compulsive desire for inter species communication. Aesthetic, disjunctive and subjective interventions overlay acute observation to define our delusional stance when confronted with the hard facts of environmental consequence.

The Murray’s Edge: a River in Drought (2007 - 2009), is a series of photographs of the Murray River documented from the headwaters in the Mount Kosciusko National Park to the Coorong in South Australia. The narrative sequence refers back to earlier witnessing of the river, creating a comparative study of the Murray River from 70s, the 80s, to 2009.

In 2010 the Campbelltown Regional Art Centre commissioned an artwork focusing on the Georges River for the international exhibition, River. A series of photographs contrast remnants of the natural beauty of the river’s environment in contrast to the destruction wrought by long wall coal mining on this riparian environment.

Invited to represent Australia in Documenta14 (2017) Bonita Ely created the futuristic installation, Plastikus Progressus, a sardonic Natural History diorama of plastic eating creatures, genetically engineered using the CRIPR method to clean up our plastic pollution of the trans-ecology of water. A photographic history of this environmental decline begins in 1907, the year bakelite was invented, featuring pristine nature in Sydney, Athens and near Kassel, the Urwald Sababurg Forest, next to documentation of the plastic pollution of rivers in Athens, the Fulda River in Kassel, and the Cooks River in Sydney in 2017. Set in 2054, diorama’s creatures, surrounded by their food, plastic waste, are constructed from plastic vacuum cleaners, accompanied by the haunting sounds of Australian birds, and often humorous, always poignant taxonomies based on the taxonomies of the Earth’s real creatures to demonstrate how extraordinary they are. The taxonomies may be explored on a touchscreen also. The installation is conceptualised by Histories, a diagrammatic work on paper listing invasions, wars, dictators, revolutions, inventions from 1900BC to now, and a photographic dado of plastic waste.

In Kassel, the installation, Interior Decoration, addresses the intergenerational affects of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), informed by her family‘s experiences and thorough research. The military is domesticated; the domestic militarised. Her mother’s Singer sewing machine and bobby pins are transformed into a Vickers machine gun. Trench, constructed from her parent’s bedroom furniture turned inside-out is surveyed by Watchtower, constructed from a double bed, its floor a drooping child’s cot mattress, with all the padding removed. Silence is disturbed by sudden bursts a treadle sewing machine’s racket emanating from a gun-like structure across the Trench, aimed at the Sewing Machine Gun. The sculptural pieces are surrounded by a dado of traumatic imagery, for example wars, monuments photographed in Zanzibar in remembrance of the slave trade, refugees, and the impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples.

http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/1001/bonita-ely

In 2019 she lay in the Darling River at Menindee amongst dead fish in the pose of Millais’s Ophelia.

The performance for the Sydney Biennale’s Art After Dark program, Slip Slap (2022) explores plastic pollution in a domestic setting. The artist attempts to take a bath but discovers the bath tub is full of disgusting plastic rubbish which she tosses out and wraps around her body. The performance ends with her lying down in a fatal position, rocking back and forth in grief inside a drawing of a large fish made with the plastic waste.

Researching natural environments in the vicinity of the Adani coal mine during the contrasting Dry and Wet Seasons in Central Queensland revealed that the coal mine is located on top of the Great Artesian Basin - the world’s biggest aquifer. This source of ground water stretches up towards Papua New Guinea under the ocean, down through Queensland to New South Wales, across into South Australia and the Northern territory. It is not widely known about in detail, if at all. Exploring and revealing the importance of this extraordinary natural phenomena during 2020, 2021, 2022 has produced maps and imaginative interpretations of the Great Artesian Basin.

Bonita Ely has a diverse practice, her methodology based on the premise that a particular idea requires the deployment of particular mediums, contexts and technologies. Her artwork of the 70s was a warning of environmental issues that now are in full focus, and continue as the focus of her practice as one of Australia’s important artists concerned with environmental and socio-political issues.

Now retired, Associate Professor, Bonita Ely lectured in Sculpture, Performance and Installation at the University of NSW from 1990 - 2016; also - the University of Western Sydney; Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga; Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University; Prahran College of Fine Arts, Melbourne; Preston Institute of Fine Arts, Melbourne.

An inaugural member of the Environmental Research Initiative for Art (ERIA), UNSW Art & Design faculty, the major outcome, the commission to create the sculpture, Thunderbolt for the 10th Anniversary of the Sydney Olympics at Jacaranda Park, 2010, adjacent to the Olympic Park Station, also shown in Broken Hill, an Environmental Research Initiative for Art (ERIA) event, The sculpture’s lighting signals the level of consumption of energy in the neighbourhood at night, changing colour from green, yellow to red. Powered by solar energy.

Represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.