Bonnie-Jean Whitlock
Master of fine art
RMIT University Melbourne
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting /
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock
First Name: Bonnie-Jean
Last Name: Whitlock
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting
Sectors:
My Location: Melbourne, Australia
University / College: RMIT University Melbourne
Course / Program Title: Master of fine art
About
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock (b.1992) is originally from an isolated farming community in rural Victoria, Australia, and currently lives and works in Melbourne where she completed a Master of Fine Art graduate from RMIT University (2023)
Specialising in large scale paintings with highly saturated colour palates and surrealist imagery, her work examines themes of layering, embodiment and place. She draws inspiration from narratives surrounding her rural off-grid upbringing as well as a keen interest in geology and environmentalism – focusing on the notion of layering as it relates to human experience, the stratum of the earth and to culture – and in this, the notion that nothing is without context.
Bonnie has a keen interest in repurposed and recycled art materials; working on bed sheets, leaving fabric edges raw, hand building frames, and working with what she has on hand. Her paintings are continuous pentimentos as she repeatedly paints over and modifies existing work. Traces of the material's past life are left evident as an acknowledgement of both her fascination with layering and her ever-evolving relationship with painting and making.
She exhibits regularly in Melbourne where she is involved in community arts initiatives and works as a youth art educator. Bonnie is a recipient of the Evan Lowenstein Arts Management Prize (2023).
My capstone MFA project, The junk pile, is an expanded painting project that draws upon the relationship between bodily experience, place, and the analogue nature of painting through themes of layering and accumulation. It aims to align painting with acts of collecting and processing. I use imagery that references my family home, portraits of my partner, as well as abstracted figurative and surreal forms, I try to represent the felt relationships I have with my subjects. Typically I work on canvas or cotton, staining and painting onto the un-primed fabric, utilising dyes, house paint, drawing materials, salt, chalk, raw pigment and wax. Most of my materials are repurposed or second hand, I work in direct response to what I have on hand - drawing from the junk pile that is my studio. I work intuitively and in tune with my body, resulting in installations of both large scale works that explore the physical limits of my body, and smaller more intricate works that seek an inner calm. I maintain a process and material led practice underpinned by theoretical discourse on philosophy and psychology, and consider the act of staining a form of embedding, and painting a form of layering. The notion of a junk pile references the collection of experiences held within a person. Things that we subconsciously draw upon every day and the things that are fundamental to who we are, like our internal layering.
Competitions
