HQ, 1980

1980 HQ, installation. The Security Show, George Paton & Ewing Galleries, University of Melbourne. Exterior: Hop bush branches from the Malley where Bonita Ely spent her childhood making cubby houses like this. Viewers could enter the cubby house.

1980 HQ, the interior of the installation. The interior’s walls made of glowing, waxed brown paper, with embedded children’s faces.

1980 HQ, installation. On the floor a grey army blanket with a jam pan full of honey.

CUBBY HOUSES MALLEE-STYLE

I grew up in the 1950s on a Soldier Settlement block in Robinvale, Victoria. My friends and I made many cubby houses.

At picking time we constructed huge cubbies, stacking sweat boxes to create walls, floors and roofs, alcoves and porches. These cubbies suddenly disappeared when the crates were whipped away to be filled with dried fruit to transport the harvest to the Robinvale Co-Op. We played under the tank stands around the house. We engraved floor plans into the packed red dirt in our backyard; flattened spaces in the long spear grass between our properties; made tree houses.

We played in the hollow trunk of a huge river red gum at the sandbar we called Saint Kilda Beach on the Murray River. If you pressed your ear against the trunk you could hear the wind in the leaves far above.

The Thrilling Three’s headquarters in the old chook house was our most salubrious cubby. Inspired by Enid Blyton, we invented symbols as familiar to us as the alphabet we learnt at school, a secret text to communicate and solve future crimes that may occur in the neighborhood. Furtive messages were passed to and fro, hidden in a jam jar beside the track on the border of our two properties.

Every Spring, we picked wildflowers for our mothers - grevilia, billy buttons, boronia, wild violets, paper daisies, wattle. Led by the trail of wildflowers we made our most complex cubbies in the uncleared bushland next to the drying racks.

We selected boronia and hop bushes growing around a central space. Using a tommy hawk pinched from Dad’s tool shed, we hacked out the branches in the middle, using them to weave walls into the surrounding foliage - filling in, curving over - to form a completely enclosed, child sized space. We scraped up the clover burrs levelled the red dirt floor, making tiny alcoves to store my precious willow patterned tea set and our imaginary food, our dolls’ things, with a purse each full of money made from rabbit dung with pound notes cut out of Mum’s English Women’s Weekly magazines.

My imaginary friend, Marian, had run away from home and hid in my cubby. I pretended to smuggle her food, our secret friendship giving expression to my own trauma dealing with my father’s emotional withdrawal and sometimes violent behaviour, no doubt as a result of his undiagnosed PTSD as a World War Two veteran. He was a dancer, a crooner, a bighearted man least likely to be indoctrinated to kill people with a machine gun, however regimented his training. On the few occasions he talked about the war he wept, calling the Japanese ‘the poor bastards’ …

Now I’m an artist creating sculptures in immersive artworks, spatial environments that people can explore, react to, think about, sometimes taking them back to uncanny childhood feelings.

Published, The Australian, This (Playful) Life, 27-28/08/2022

BREADLINE, 1982

1981 *Breadline*, performance, Anzart. Queenstown, New Zealand. A huge pile of bread dough is on the back table; Bonita’s assistant presses her body into a slab of dough to make a negative cast of her body. Bread is baking throughout the performance in the venue filling the space, smelling delicious.

1981 *Breadline*, performance. While her assistant transfers the rest of the dough onto the table on the rightt, Bonita washes off the dough.

Bonita creates a sculpture of the female body using geometric forms - the pyramid and wedge. Afterwards the audience is invited to eat some bread.

Below: Throughout the performance images of women doing prenatal exercises and breast feeding are projected behind the action.

EARTHWORKS, BAHA CALIFORNIA, 1981

1981, Baha California, Mexico, location of earthwork - Bonita Ely is on the top of hill on RHS.

1981, Baha California, Mexico: Eroded rocks from the water’s edge wrap around the top of the hill.

1981, Baha California, Mexico: Paper installation - all the cactuses were in flower.

1981, Baha California, Mexico: Paper installation, detail.

DOGWOMAN COMMUNICATES WITH THE YOUNGER GENERATION, 1982

Nude apart from a dingo pelt head dress and a small screen across the pregnant belly to communicate with the unborn child. The same images of dogs are projected onto an overhead screen for viewers.

DOGWOMAN MAKES HISTORY, 1985

Dogwoman makes history, 1986 — 1985 Dogwoman Makes History, Making Appearances, Charlottenberg Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, curated by Gary Sangster, Director of Artspace, An exhibition of Australian contemporary art, for the 5th International Theatre Festival, Copenhagen, June 1985.
The installation - Ceramics, photography,
1986, First Draft, Sydney.
On my return to Sydney a reprised version of the Dogwoman artwork was selected for an exhibition in Copenhagen, by Gary Sangster, curator and Director of Artspace. I applied for a studio in Kunstlerhaus Bethanien to continue researching the Dogwoman theme.
The second version focused more on religious as well as social and historical ‘evidence’ to prove that relations between dogs and women were the basis of all religions. The idea was to critique the male version of history and religion as a fiction, by creating an alternative fiction. I was interested in the feminist contributions to Structuralist and Post Structuralist philosophy, attending lecturers by philosophers such as Elizabeth Grotz at Sydney University, and Helen Grace, Art Theorist and artist with whom I worked at the University of Western Sydney.

Performance at First Draft showing the Dogwoman’s Map of the World.

1983

CONTROLLED ATMOSPHERE INC.: PROGRESSIVE DEMENTIA OF INTEGRATED RESOURCE ASSEMBLY

CONTROLLED ATMOSPHERE: LAKE PEDDER ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT

Bonita Ely’s artwork, Controlled Atmosphere, was first performed on the 23rd May, 1983 in Hobart, Tasmania, in Australia Post’s vacated Mail Exchange Building for the Anzart festival, held periodically as an exchange between New Zealand and Australia.

The performance was concurrent with mass national protests against the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania. Earlier in 1972 in South West Tasmania a dam had been built by the Hydro Electric Commission, which flooded Lake Pedder, a uniquely beautiful, natural feature made famous by the photographer, Olegas Truchanas, whose public slide shows raised awareness of threats to Tasmania’s wilderness. Protests against hydroelectric development gathered force across Australia when the damming of the Franklin River was announced, leading to the formation of the Greens Political Party in Australia. The Franklin River was saved.

ACTION: One of Olegas Truchanas’s most famous images of Lake Pedder’s beach, before it was flooded, was photocopied three times. Date stamped and signed, one was shredded, another pigeonholed, the third pinned to the wall after being photocopied three times, as before, repeating the process with each iteration. The shreds of each photocopy were photocopied, date stamped and signed also. Photocopiers at this time enlarged documents slightly, which the performative action exploited. Copies of copies were repeatedly photocopied until the original image completely disappeared. By the end of the performance the wall of the office was covered, and the photographic image had completely degenerated into faint, obscure, wriggly lines.