Bonita Ely

Born 1946 in Mildura, Australia
Lives and works in Sydney, Australia

Art Gallery of New South Wales and UNSW Galleries

Art Gallery of New South Wales

At home with the Locust People (Itchy feet) 1974–75
oil and collage on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds from the Rudy Komon Memorial Fund 2015

At home with the Locust People 1974
acrylic on canvas
Collection of James C Sourris
Courtesy of Milani Galleries

c20th Mythological Beasts: At home with the Locust People 1975
mixed media; video, 19 min, colour, sound
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, purchased 2014 with funds from James C Sourris AM through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation

From the deserts of Ancient Egypt and the outcroppings of North America’s Rocky Mountains to Australia’s drought-ridden plains, locust swarms have devastated harvests, communities and entire landscapes. This biblical phenomenon – a sign of great punishment or the end of times – is scientifically referred to as the ‘gregarious phase’ whereby solitary locusts congregate in heaving, mass-producing and ravenous swarms.

For Bonita Ely, who explores themes of environmental degradation in her art, there is an apt correlation between the gregarious phase of locusts and the relationship humans have with the natural world. Created in the 1970s when questions surrounding population and pollution were reaching a fever pitch, the ‘Locust People’ works depict modern domestic scenes populated by vulgar human–insect hybrids. In each, the Locust People have left their surroundings either bare or smouldering, yet remain unbothered by anything except one another.

Ely’s grim prediction of future environmental collapse positions humans as both the victim and the perpetrator. In c20th Mythological Beasts: At home with the Locust People, a nuclear family reclines, unfazed, while watching scenes of a dying world on television. Like a locust swarm, humanity will not stop until there is nothing left to consume.

UNSW Galleries

Interior Decoration, 2013–

adapted installation: Singer sewing machine, bobby pins; bedroom furniture, mattress springs; photographs; sound.

Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Bonita Ely’s Interior Decoration maps the intergenerational impact of conflict-induced, posttraumatic stress disorder on soldiers, cultures, displaced people, and families. The work references her father’s own ‘shellshock’, its impact on her childhood home, and the grief that radiated from the profound violence of war.

‘PTSD typically leads to emotional numbing (and hence to relationship problems), recurrent nightmares, substance abuse (traditionally, alcoholism), and most frighteningly, delusional outbursts of violence.’ (Joshua S. Goldstein, 2001)

Ely’s father was a machine gunner deployed in the British Mandate of Palestine, Papua New Guinea, and Borneo. Reflecting on the unprovoked domestic violence that destabilised her usually peaceful Soldier Settlement home on the Murray River, Ely creates a watchtower and trench from her parents’ deconstructed bedroom furniture. The trench includes her mother’s treasured yet smoke-stained print of Albert Namatjira’s Gums, Central Australia. Her Singer sewing machine – its click-clacking, a trigger for her father’s aggression – is fused with contorted bobby pins and reimagined as a machine gun.

Ely’s field of war is encircled by a series of photographs alongside the names of Jewish people deported from Kassel, Germany by Nazis. The traumatic imagery depicts slavery, displacement, and invasion, including Ely’s own documentation of the detritus of war following her father’s tours of duty in mandatory Palestine and Papua New Guina.

In this ring of torment, the objects that make up a home are transformed into a battleground that ricochets through generations. This psychological architecture can be seen as a metaphor for PTSD – the military is domesticated, the domestic militarised.

Bonita Ely is an Australian artist living in Sydney who creates conceptual, environmental and socio-political art through various media, such as sculpture, installation, performance, video, photography. Since the 1970s, she has been fascinated by science, communication, human impacts and the natural world, creating artworks that often use abject aesthetics, wry humour, her vivid imagination, lateral thinking, forensic research. Ely invites viewers to actively engage with her installations and performances, addressing existential issues – environmental destruction, cultural interface, feminism, the zeitgeist.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.