Bonita Ely facts for kids

Bonita Ely (born 1946) is an Australian artist who lives in Sydney. Her artwork has been shown all over the world. She became well-known in the 1970s for her art about the Murray-Darling river system. Bonita Ely uses many different art forms and often explores ideas about women's rights, the environment, and social issues.

Early Life and Education

Bonita Ely was born in Mildura, Australia, and grew up in Robinvale. This town is on the banks of the Murray River in Victoria. Her family grew oranges and grapes on a farm. Her father was a World War II veteran.

Bonita has always loved art. She remembers drawing from a very young age, even before school. She would draw in the dirt with sticks or use charcoal from the wood stove to draw on walls.

After high school, Bonita moved to Melbourne. She studied painting at Caulfield Technical College. Later, she studied sculpture at the Prahran College of Fine Arts. She also studied art in London and at the University of Sydney. In 2009, she earned her PhD from the University of Western Sydney.

Teaching Art

Bonita Ely has also had a long career teaching art. She taught sculpture at Prahran College of Fine Art. In the 1970s and early 80s, she also taught workshops on performance art, which was a new art form then.

From 1990 to 2017, she taught at the College of Fine Arts (COFA) at the University of New South Wales. She helped create the Sculpture, Performance, and Installation Studies area there. She also taught workshops in Vietnam and New Zealand. She helped many students with their art projects and research. In 2017, she retired as an Honorary Associate Professor.

Artistic Journey

Bonita Ely is known for her art that focuses on the environment, social issues, and women's rights. She often uses different types of media to create her work.

Her first art show was in London in 1972. She became recognized in Australia at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in 1975. One of her early works was C20th Mythological Beasts: at Home with the Locust People (1975). This was an installation, which means it was a large art piece that filled a space.

Performance Art

In the 1970s and 1980s, Bonita Ely created many performance art pieces. These often explored environmental and political topics.

• In Jabiluka UO₂ (1979), she looked at issues around Aboriginal land rights and uranium mining in Australia.
• The work Breadline (1980) explored themes of womanhood and pregnancy. During this performance, she baked bread in the shape of a female form. She then served the bread to the audience. This piece made people think about women's traditional roles and how women are seen in society.
• In Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1981) and Dogwoman Makes History (1983), she explored how history is often told from a male point of view. She used images of dogs from museums in Berlin to make her point.

Unique Installations

Bonita Ely also creates unique installations.

• For her Master of Art project in 1991, she created We Live to be Surprised. This installation included nine red thunderbolts and strange creatures called 'snabbits'. Snabbits were imagined as creatures with a snail's body and a rabbit's head. The artwork suggested a future Earth where these snabbits were the only food left.
• In 2010, she created a public artwork called Thunderbolt for Sydney's Green Olympics. This sculpture is made from a recycled windmill and uses solar energy. It changes color from green to yellow to red at night to show how much energy the neighborhood is using.

Focus on the Murray River

The Murray River is one of the longest rivers in the world and has been a very important topic in Bonita Ely's art.

Murray River Punch

Murray River Punch (1980) is one of her most famous performances. She acted like a cooking show host and gave a "recipe" for a punch drink. The ingredients for this "punch" were the actual pollutants found in the Murray River. This performance made people think about the river's pollution.

Later, as the river's health got worse during a long drought, she created Murray River Punch: the Dip. This time, the "recipe" was for a "delicious pie filler" made from river pollutants, showing the scarcity of water. In 2014, she made Murray River Punch: the Soup, using rubbish collected from the river. This performance made fun of TV cooking shows.

Menindee Fish Kill

In 2019, many fish died in the Darling River at Menindee due to drought and pollution. Bonita Ely performed in the river among the dead fish. She posed like a famous painting called "Ophelia," showing helplessness and sadness about the environmental disaster.

The Great Artesian Basin

Bonita Ely also researched the Great Artesian Basin (GAB). This is the world's largest underground water source and is very important for Australia's dry areas. She created a large floor map (5 meters by 4.14 meters) of the GAB. This map shows water flow, springs, and also places where coal, gas, and oil are being explored. This highlights how these activities could pollute the GAB.

Exhibitions and Public Art

Bonita Ely's art has been shown in many important places around the world. These include the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Public Sculptures in Huế, Vietnam

She has created three public sculptures for the City of Huế in Vietnam.

• In 1998, she made an interactive sculpture for children. It looks like a hollow haystack, similar to the rice haystacks in Vietnam. Children can go inside, and it collects sounds from around it. It's made from traditional bricks from the Huế Citadel.
• In 2002, she created Longevity: Scissors and Sickles. This sculpture uses old metal, including pieces from the American War. It's shaped like a gourd and represents a symbol of long life.
• In 2006, she made a 6-meter tall steel sculpture that glows in the dark. It uses a zig-zag thunderbolt shape, which she has used in other artworks.

Documenta 14 Exhibition

In 2017, Bonita Ely was chosen to represent Australia at documenta14, a very important art exhibition. She showed two installations:

• Interior Decoration was shown in Kassel, Germany. This artwork explores how difficult experiences, like those faced by war veterans or refugees, can affect families for generations. It uses everyday household objects to create a feeling of a military space mixed with a home. For example, a sewing machine might be combined with bobby pins to look like a machine gun. The artwork makes viewers think about hidden conflicts and suffering.
• Plastikus Progressus was shown in Athens, Greece. This installation looks at how plastic pollution affects our water. It's set in the year 2054 and looks like a natural history museum display. It features imagined creatures that eat plastic, made from old vacuum cleaner parts. These creatures are supposed to be genetically engineered to clean up plastic in oceans and rivers. The artwork makes us think about the future of plastic pollution.

Personal Life

Bonita Ely met artist Marr Grounds around 1981 in Canada. They had a daughter together, who was born in Berlin.

See also

In Spanish: Bonita Ely para niños