BOOKS 04, NOOSA REGIONAL GALLERY, 2004
Beachcombing, a daily meditation, a primary gathering ground of flotsam and jetsam for the making of art, for Keep Our Beaches Clean, for walking with dog, for seeing anew, to breath sea air…
yesterday’s dusk, another nightfall, dry-season bleached, skyblue, a different cloudscape, wet-season washouts, a tidal lagoon, purple skies, a mangrove forest, the foreshore giants, the coconut palms, evergreen…
the movement of waves, a banded sea, a coral polyp, the distant reef.
These are the things I see and know, each day an altered playground.
Since graduating from P.I.T (now R.M.I.T), Melbourne in 1976, Bonney Bombach has devoted most of her career to painting and related two-dimensional practises. On relocating to the sea in the Whitsunday’s, her focus shifted to ephemeral and site-specific environmental installation and to sculpture, including major Public Art Commissions.
A preoccupation with environmental preservation is reflected in the choice of materials, predominantly plastic detritus washed onto the beaches and obsessively collected by the artist who is never without the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag in her meditative beach walking. This reference to the manmade, to culture, is counter-balanced by the inclusion of natural materials including wood.
The processes involved in creating these works evolve through a series of stages- collecting, cleaning, sorting, storing, selecting and finally constructing.
Playfulness and a quirky humour are an inherent part of the process and of the finished works.
Selected from a larger, on-going series of sculptures, these small works invite intimacy and, though abstract in form, display an anthropomorphic quality reflecting the artist’s long-standing relationship with figuration in image making.
Analogous to the leaves/pages of a book held together by a central ‘spine’, the accumulation of threaded layers become part of a narrative referencing the artist’s sense of place and culture, environmental concerns and the poetics of nature in the colours of a Nightfall, the movement of water in Bright Sea and the passage of time in Bleached.
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