Bonnie Jean Whitlock

Beacons

20 - 31 August 2025

Opening Night

Friday 22 August | 6 - 8 pm

G3

Artist Statement

Beacons’ examines the following four subjects as beacons of truth:

Love and place as driving forces.

The body as organic matter.

Violence as self-perpetuating.

and,

Nature as relentless, neutral, and central.  

“I’ve adopted these ideas into my life as sort of spiritual beacons, commandments, pillars, or precepts. I find myself repeating and relying on them more heavily as politically, culturally and environmentally we’re tailspinning out of control. I wonder what to do with the continuous stream of daily tragedies that I am tethered to through my queerness, through the internet, media, my subculture and by compassion. These beacons keep me away from rabbitholes and remind me that multiple truths can co-exist. In a selfish and private way, I use them to shield my soul from despair, senselessness and miracles.”

Each painting in this exhibition explores moments and things through which one or more of these beacons are symbolised.

Artist Biography

Bonnie-Jean’s work functions to explore queer perspectives and autobiographical narratives around morality and place. It exists in a sustained state of experimentation and repetition: Revisiting her childhood home to mine for context and memories, photographing her partner to document her transition, and tracing parts of her body and photographs.

She treats the surface more like a textile than a painting: Folding, beading, and dyeing it with ink. Rubbing wax into areas to create resists and using salt to encourage the pigment to dry in interesting ways. Glass, wax, salt, flax, cotton, oil, water and pigment all speak to a type of alchemy. For Bonnie, painting is deeply rooted in a fixation with analogue process and construction. She chases relationships between the subject, symbolism and materials: Following patterns made through the dying process, arranging images to emphasise them and embellishing parts of the narrative she wants to romanticise.

She relates fabric to a body and to the stratum of the earth, all vessels that bare traces of their lives, all that have a penetrable surface layer, and all fixed to a path of least resistance. An ongoing practice grants permission to spend time in these material and conceptual indulgences. In a culture so hell bent on productivity and action, that can be difficult to do without guilt, so paintings make it tangible.

Bonnie-Jean Whitlock was raised in Far East Gippsland; she currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. She completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 2023 and was a recipient of the Evan Lowenstein Arts Management Prize.

Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au

Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map

How to get here
Tram: Route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens

Melway Ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets

Bus: 504 (Reid Street)