Bonita Ely

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.[4] 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.[5]

Her performances of the 1970s and 1980s were concerned primarily with environmental and political issues. For instance in her performance, Jabiluka UO2, [1979] she explored issues surrounding Aboriginal Land Rights and uranium mining in the Northern Territory.[6]

In her work Breadline (1980) themes of womanhood and pregnancy were examined. Ely cast and moulded shapes of her body in bread dough which she washed off in a bath of milk. During this action bread was baked then served to viewers after the performance. As a complex exploration of women's traditional roles, the performance is both a celebration of motherhood and nurture, and a critique of woman as a consumable product of culture.[7] Murray River Punch (1980) is one of Ely's most well known and significant performances.[8] The work was first performed at Melbourne University's George Paton Gallery in June 1980 as part of a week of performance titled Women at Work.[9] In this work the artist set up a cooking demonstration in the university's Student Union foyer at lunchtime and assumed the role of a cooking demonstrator who narrates the recipe for a ‘punch’ drink, the ingredients coming from pollutants in the Murray River.

The Murray River, one of the world's longest rivers (2,700 km) has been an enduring focus of her practice, most recently addressing its declining health during the Millennium Drought when environmentally unsustainable agricultural practices exacerbated acid sulphate contamination and outbreaks of blue green algae. Bonita Ely's forensic research along the length of the river resulted in a photographic series titled 'The Murray's Edge'. A reprise of 'Murray River Punch' with the subtitle, 'the C21st', produced a tasty (not) dip due to a scarcity of water, the ingredients all the pollutants in the river.

In Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1981), and Dogwoman Makes History (1983), the anthropomorphised fascination with another species was documented, alongside the gendered construction of history, using images of dogs in the art of Berlin museums, documented whilst artist in residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.[10]

In 1998 Bonita Ely was invited to create a public sculpture for the Children's Cultural Centre in Hue, Vietnam, participating in the 2nd Sculpture Symposium. Her interactive work takes the form of a hollow haystack, referencing the conical stacks made of rice 'hay' in the fields around Hue that were used for cooking fires, not animal feed. The sculpture's three arch shaped entrances are approximately one metre high, children's height, and its barrel shaped base acts like an acoustic chamber, collecting the sounds in the environment surrounding it. Small holes in the conical space above illumine the interior with soft bands of light. The sculpture is made from the small, traditional bricks from the Citadel's brickworks. As such it is a record of bygone cultural materials & practices.

Research of Hue's longevity characters informed another public sculpture in Hue titled "Longevity: Scissors and Sickles" (2002). Scissors and sickles made by local blacksmiths were caste and braised together in a lattice pattern to form a three dimensional interpretation of a longevity symbol. Shaped like a gourd, the scrap metal used included shrapnel from the American War, as the Vietnamese call it.

In 2006 Bonita was invited back for Hue's 4th International Sculpture Symposium, where her sculpture glows in the dark using solar paint – a sceptre of the Earth's energies at night. The title, "Lake Thunder" brings the sculpture's site, Thuy Tien Lake, into focus as an essential aspect of the work. The conjunction of lake and thunder also refers to traditional Taoist philosophical principals: "THUNDER stands for our true essence, LAKE stands for our true sense, WATER stands for our real knowledge, and FIRE stands for our conscious knowledge. These four are the true 'four forms' inherent in us." [from the Inner Teachings of Taoism, Chang Po-Tuan, Shambala Books, 1986]

This zig zag symbol, warning of the danger of electricity, began its permutations in a three part installation, "We Live to be Surprised" in Performance Space, Sydney in 1991. Nine red thunderbolts shoot out of the floor. In the space opposite, 'snabbits' - genetically engineered creatures combining the snail's legless body and rabbit's head - hide in ruins. They are the only living creatures left on Earth. A short story tells us they are an excellent source of food in the future's dystopian environments as they cannot escape and are delicious. Between the thunderbolts and the snabbits' habitat, viewers pass through a corridor of golden light, a liminal space between energy and entropy.

In 2010 Bonita Ely was selected to create a public artwork to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Sydney's Green Olympics. Made from a recycled windmill, the 'Thunderbolt' is powered by solar energy, the sculpture's lighting signals to the community their level of energy consumption in the neighborhood at night, changing colour from green to yellow to red.

These environmental works are informed by Ely's cross cultural research of our relationship to land, first tracing the narratives inscribed upon natural landscapes in Australia's Aboriginal mythologies, or song lines, that weave across tribal nations' countries, functioning as ethical, spiritual, and practical narratives used to navigate across complex terrain, embedding environmental knowledges essential for food gathering, hunting, reading the seasons, the winds, etc. Similarly in India's Hindu mythologies, Chinese and Japanese gardens, Europe's pre-Christian animistic belief systems, the landscape was/is inscribed with meaning. The installation, "Juggernaut" , shown in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Asian Biennale of Contemporary Art, Dhaka, Bangladesh (1999), evoked this inscription of terrain. Each giant, spiralling turn transforms its internal spatial form, its peripatetic force simultaneous to a sense of fragility - the giant spirals are kept in place with wedges at floor level and spacers held in tension between each turn of the spiral, so the sculpture's structural integrity is in 'suspended animation'.

Bonita Ely's recent installations exhibited in Documenta14, 2017, are 'Interior Decoration' in the Palais Bellevue in Kassel, Germany, and in Athens, 'Plastikus Progressus'.

'Interior Decoration' investigates the inter-generational effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“PTSD typically leads to emotional numbing, … recurrent nightmares, substance abuse (traditionally, alcoholism), … delusional outbursts of violence.” (Goldstein, 2001).

The installation, 'Interior Decoration' is embedded into the domestic environment of the Palais Bellevue. It explores the inter generational effects of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered, for example, by war veterans, refugees, Indigenous people, displaced people, victims of genocide. Constructed from domestic objects, the military is domesticated, the domestic militarised. For example, 'Sewing Machine Gun' is made from the conjunction of a Singer sewing machine, a woman's industry, bobbypins, her intimate femininity, to create a Vickers machine gun, problematising the encodings of these objects to present the viewer with emotionally charged conundrums reflective of complexities rather than a didactic illustration of gendered conflict. Similarly the bedroom furniture turned inside-out forms polished wooden tunnel-like trenches, hiding places, all surveyed by the ladder-less 'Watchtower', made from a marriage bed, its floor the wire springs of a child's cot mattress. The installation embeds the viewer in the uncanny feelings of an adult transported back to childhood, inviting exploration to uncover its multiplicities.

The sculptural components are contextualised by a dado around the room composed of a visual narrative addressing trauma, and the names of Kassel's Jewish people deported and killed during WW2. Their names are inscribed on a section of railway tracks at the KulturBahnhof (Kassel Central Station), an installation by Dr. Horst Hoheisel, 'Das Gedächtnis der Gleise' (2015) - 'The Memory of the Tracks'. 'Interior Decoration' is a reminder of PTSD as a ubiquitous yet under acknowledged cause of conflict and suffering in social and personal relations.

The installation, 'Plastikus Progressus' in the Athens iteration of Documenta14 is exhibited in the Athens School of Fine Arts Gallery. It addresses the contribution of casual littering to the plastics pollution of the trans-ecology of water. Set in the year 2054, it takes the form of a natural history display. A diorama features plastic eating creatures, their physiologies built on vacuum cleaners & the parts thereof the artist found discarded on Sydney's streets. The creatures have been genetically engineered using the CRISPR method to clean up the plastics polluting oceans and rivers. The diorama is contextualised by photographs of pristine nature as it would have been in 1905, the year bakelite was invented, plus case studies of rivers in Athens, Kassel and Sydney, 2017, showing plastic pollution off city streets floating towards the ocean, contextualised by a world history from 2000BC to 2054AD showing the emergence, dominance then decline of nations, ending in 2054 with plastic filled, swirling gyres.

Each genetically modified creature is described in a taxonomy presented on a touch screen. For example, the taxonomy of the creature called Hells Angel - Classification: Inferna angelus : Common name, Hells Angel; άγγελος της κόλασης [ángelos tis kólasis] – Reptile, (tortoise). Symbolising longevity, living up to 150 years and more, the tortoise in many Eastern cultures is also known as the Black Warrior, hence the appellation, Hells Angel. Named for the motor cycle macho men whose expertise at sand drag racing hardly mirrors the slow gait of the species, averaging 0.27 km/hr, other characteristics reflect quite accurately the ultra masculine, whichever its gender Their black protective shell resembles Shogun head gear, with tiny horn shaped vodka bottle receptors that send low sound vibrations to the Hells Angel's eardrums. The legs of the reptile from which they evolved are the sound receptors. The Hells Angel has a long protruding tail in which its exclusive diet of plastic flowers is digested and stored, much like a fuel tank. Ironically the females are usually larger than the males. Their brain is small with no hippocampus, which anatomically enables behaviors such as emotion, learning, memory and spatial navigation. They are known to have survived after decapitation for up to 6 months.

See http://plastikus.online

Unfortunately an 'off target' outcome of the genetic engineering process has been the creation of plastic plants, which many of the creatures, such as the Hells Angel, prefer to eat rather than our disgusting plastic waste.

The humour in Ely's artworks draws the viewer into a deep engagement with the concerns of her practice.

J.S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge University Press, Ch. 5.

M. J. Diamond, 2007, My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives, W.W. Norton & Co: New York.

Nadew, GT, Exposure to traumatic events, prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder and alcohol abuse in Aboriginal communities. Rural and Remote Health 12: 1667. (Online) 2012. Available: http://www.rrh.org.au

• Australian Video Art Archive
  Scanlines: Media Art in Australia since the 1960s
• documenta 14 Exhibition Website (2017)[1]