Dr Bonita Ely was born in Mildura, Victoria, childhood spent in Robinvale , a WW2 Soldier Settlement town on the Murray River in Australia, and lives and works in Sydney. Her trans disciplinary art practice, although addressing universal values, pioneered Australian environmental and socio-political art in the 1970s, premised on the belief that:
Like it or not, we are members of a particularly large and noisy family called the great apes. Ref/ Harari, Y. N., "Sapiens: a brief history of humankind", 2014
From 1972 - 1975 she explored the effects of urban pollution and consumerism in London and New York, creating the installation, C20th Mythological Beasts: At Home with the Locust People, with three paintings. Returning to Australia in 1975 the Murray River Project (1977 – 1986) includes the performance, Murray River Punch (1980, reprised in 2008, 2014) where the river’s pollutants are the recipes’ foul ingredients.
To contextualise these enquiries she has investigated Indigenous Australia’s ownership and cultural presence in Australia’s natural environments. For example in 1979 the action of a performance, Jabiluka UO2, describes the impact on culture and environment of the proposed mining of uranium at Jabiluka in the Kakadu National Park. The proposal was recently abandoned after national and international protests led by the Mirarr people, the traditional owners of Jabiluka. Later in Australia’s bicentennial year, 1988, a series of paintings of so-called ‘wilderness’ in the Outback asserts the Indigenous ownership, custodianship and the cultural significance of these landscapes. Each painting’s title begins, Scenes from the Appropriation of … [name of Indigenous owners of the wilderness area]. This fieldwork was a central to her Master of Fine Arts research, investigating the impacts of culture on ‘Wilderness’.
Her feminist critique must not be forgotten. Residencies at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, produced Dogwoman, her critique of history’s gendered bias, inventing an ancient women’s cult evidenced in images from all over the world of dogs and humans interacting, from Berlin’s art collections and environs (1982, 1983, 1984). Artworks presented for her Master of Fine Art examination in 1990 explored a futuristic world of genetic engineering, featuring the monoculture, ‘snabbits’, an edible hybrid combining the rabbit and snail. Hiding in architectural ruins, the snabbits were contextualised by lightning bolts shooting out of the earth.
In a series of installations in Los Angeles, nature’s power is manifest (the 1994 earthquake); later in Utah, its commodification (2002). Research for public artworks in Hue, Vietnam (1998, 2002, 2006), inspired her PhD thesis, researching the influences of Taoism on contemporary art, completed in 2009.
The solar powered artwork, Thunderbolt, commissioned for the Sydney Olympics Tenth Anniversary (2010), uses light to signal to the community its energy consumption.
Recent artworks, such as, Sewing Machine Gun (2013), and DUKw (2015) are components of the installation, Interior Decoration, a word play on military decoration, the awarding of medals. The installation addresses the interpersonal, intergenerational affects of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an outcome of war. Personal reflections upon her childhood in Robinvale, a Soldier Settlement town, inform the artwork, supported by research of her father’s war experiences and his tours of duty in the 2/1st Machine Gun Battalion in Palestine, Papua New Guinea and Borneo during the Second World War.
Interior Decoration was shown in Kassel in Documenta 14, 2017, and recently exhibited in the 2024 Biennale of Sydney.
New work for the Athens iteration of Documenta 14, was an installation titled "Plastikus Progressus", of genetically engineered creatures that will clean up our plastic pollution.
Each creature is scientifically described in taxonomies on a touch screen that draw upon the wonders of the Earth’s creatures and allude to our stupidity. For example, ‘DJ Trumpussie’, is genetically combined using the CRISPR method, of cat, box jellyfish and Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacteria that breaks down plastic illustrates the idea.
In 2019 in response to an environmental catastrophe where over a million fish died in the Darling [Baaka] River near the township of Menindee, Ely immersed herself amongst the dead fish, quoting the pose of Millet's Ophelia, photographed by Melissa Williams-Brown.
A floor map of the Great Artesian Basin informs viewers about this little know water source in Australia, that is the biggest aquifer in the world.
Dr Bonita Ely retired in 2016, is an inaugural member of the Environmental Research Institute of Art [ERIA], funded by an Australia Council Linkage Grant, University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
Website: www.bonitaely.com
Like it or not, we are members of a particularly large and noisy family called the great apes. Ref/ Harari, Y. N., "Sapiens: a brief history of humankind", 2014
From 1972 - 1975 she explored the effects of urban pollution and consumerism in London and New York, creating the installation, C20th Mythological Beasts: At Home with the Locust People, with three paintings. Returning to Australia in 1975 the Murray River Project (1977 – 1986) includes the performance, Murray River Punch (1980, reprised in 2008, 2014) where the river’s pollutants are the recipes’ foul ingredients.
To contextualise these enquiries she has investigated Indigenous Australia’s ownership and cultural presence in Australia’s natural environments. For example in 1979 the action of a performance, Jabiluka UO2, describes the impact on culture and environment of the proposed mining of uranium at Jabiluka in the Kakadu National Park. The proposal was recently abandoned after national and international protests led by the Mirarr people, the traditional owners of Jabiluka. Later in Australia’s bicentennial year, 1988, a series of paintings of so-called ‘wilderness’ in the Outback asserts the Indigenous ownership, custodianship and the cultural significance of these landscapes. Each painting’s title begins, Scenes from the Appropriation of … [name of Indigenous owners of the wilderness area]. This fieldwork was a central to her Master of Fine Arts research, investigating the impacts of culture on ‘Wilderness’.
Her feminist critique must not be forgotten. Residencies at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, produced Dogwoman, her critique of history’s gendered bias, inventing an ancient women’s cult evidenced in images from all over the world of dogs and humans interacting, from Berlin’s art collections and environs (1982, 1983, 1984). Artworks presented for her Master of Fine Art examination in 1990 explored a futuristic world of genetic engineering, featuring the monoculture, ‘snabbits’, an edible hybrid combining the rabbit and snail. Hiding in architectural ruins, the snabbits were contextualised by lightning bolts shooting out of the earth.
In a series of installations in Los Angeles, nature’s power is manifest (the 1994 earthquake); later in Utah, its commodification (2002). Research for public artworks in Hue, Vietnam (1998, 2002, 2006), inspired her PhD thesis, researching the influences of Taoism on contemporary art, completed in 2009.
The solar powered artwork, Thunderbolt, commissioned for the Sydney Olympics Tenth Anniversary (2010), uses light to signal to the community its energy consumption.
Recent artworks, such as, Sewing Machine Gun (2013), and DUKw (2015) are components of the installation, Interior Decoration, a word play on military decoration, the awarding of medals. The installation addresses the interpersonal, intergenerational affects of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an outcome of war. Personal reflections upon her childhood in Robinvale, a Soldier Settlement town, inform the artwork, supported by research of her father’s war experiences and his tours of duty in the 2/1st Machine Gun Battalion in Palestine, Papua New Guinea and Borneo during the Second World War.
Interior Decoration was shown in Kassel in Documenta 14, 2017, and recently exhibited in the 2024 Biennale of Sydney.
New work for the Athens iteration of Documenta 14, was an installation titled "Plastikus Progressus", of genetically engineered creatures that will clean up our plastic pollution.
Each creature is scientifically described in taxonomies on a touch screen that draw upon the wonders of the Earth’s creatures and allude to our stupidity. For example, ‘DJ Trumpussie’, is genetically combined using the CRISPR method, of cat, box jellyfish and Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacteria that breaks down plastic illustrates the idea.
In 2019 in response to an environmental catastrophe where over a million fish died in the Darling [Baaka] River near the township of Menindee, Ely immersed herself amongst the dead fish, quoting the pose of Millet's Ophelia, photographed by Melissa Williams-Brown.
A floor map of the Great Artesian Basin informs viewers about this little know water source in Australia, that is the biggest aquifer in the world.
Dr Bonita Ely retired in 2016, is an inaugural member of the Environmental Research Institute of Art [ERIA], funded by an Australia Council Linkage Grant, University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
Website: www.bonitaely.com
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Papers by Bonita Ely
THE INTER-GENERATIONAL AFFECTS OF PTSD Exposed to the often irrational and violent behaviours of suffers of PTSD, partners and children may be traumatised, particularly if the sufferer self medicates with alcohol, becoming physically and verbally violent.
Bonita Ely shares her personal methods of ameliorating the affects of PTSD.
THE INTER-GENERATIONAL AFFECTS OF PTSD Exposed to the often irrational and violent behaviours of suffers of PTSD, partners and children may be traumatised, particularly if the sufferer self medicates with alcohol, becoming physically and verbally violent.
Bonita Ely shares her personal methods of ameliorating the affects of PTSD.
The aim of this thesis is to identify in contemporary art practices the inflections that have either direct, or indirect origins in Taoism, the conceptual source of China’s principle indigenous, cultural practices. The thesis argues that the increasingly cross cultural qualities of contemporary art practice owe much to the West’s exposure to Taoism’s non-absolutist, non-humanist tropes, a cultural borrowing that has received slight attention despite its increasingly pervasive presence. This critical analysis is structured by Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome as a metaphor for cultural influences that are pluralist permeations, rather than a linear hierachy.
The thesis tracks discourse between the West and China from early contact to the present, tracing manifold aspects of Taoism’s modes of visual representation in Western art. Chinese gardens, Chinoiserie, calligraphy, and their coalescence in Chinese painting, are analysed to locate Taoist precepts familiar to the West, principally citing the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, Taoism’s founder. Here Taoist philosophy, as synthesised in Western thought, is proven to be a source of identifiable innovations in contemporary art practice. For example, spatial articulation as a dominant element of expression in installation art is traced to Western artists’ exposure to the conceptualised spatiality of Sinocised artefacts.
Taoist precepts are analysed in the Chinese tradition of improvising upon calligraphic characters as a key factor. This model is deployed using the skills set of studio-based research to identify the experimental nature and degree of improvisation in Western artists’ adaptations of Taoist methods in innovative painting, then sculpture. Investigations of artworks are structured upon correlations between Deleuze’s theories of representation and Taoist theories of creativity. A thematic connection with Taoism located in contemporary art, namely, notions of continuity and change, assists this detailed unraveling of creative processes, aesthetics, metonymy and meaning derived from Taoism in global, contemporary art.
This workshop followed her excursions to view egg tempera paintings by Piero della Francesca in the locality. It is an ancient technique, popular during the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance for its vivid colours, and endurance.