Bea Bonafini’s solo presentation at Art-o-Rama, 2021, With or Without Us, will include new works in cork and on paper from this year.

These new mixed media works explore questions around existence, individualism, dualistic relations, consumption and extinction. They counterpose human and non-human forms made of flesh or bone, bringing together ghosts and living bodies; creatures that consume or are consumed in an ambivalent union.

The cork paintings are meticulously carved fragmented scenes that become mosaic-like landscapes and intimate portrayals. The works show angels, moons and fish replicating, scorpion claws clenching martyr-like humans, hair becoming rope and tender embraces between the living and the dead. The pastel drawings are from a deep unconscious, vibrantly unravelling like crying waterfalls, entwining and tangling in a vortex movement, twin-like, symbiotic, mutually regenerating, spiralling into existence or oblivion. Two collages sewn and trapped in thick transparent PVC float like fragments of dreams. As shiny remembrances of a vague past, they draw their material from classical antiquity; beach glass, beads, clay or plaster swim between fragments of paper as abstractly as our recollections of sensations.

Some works speak of traces of the past, becoming gardens of ghosts; With or Without Us speaks of the ghostly persistence of life. These works are inhabited by fleshless creatures, alluding to our insatiable consumption of other living creatures, and the unfolding realisation that soon we will veritably be surrounded by ghosts. They allude to symbiosis, or Donna Haraway’s ideas of sympoiesisor “making-with”, holobionts as symbiotic assemblages, ‘like knots of diverse intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems.’

Bea Bonafini’s interdisciplinary practice draws from oneiric visions, overlapping personal and ancient mythologies. Her tactile, intimate worlds centre around sensuality, vulnerability and fantasy, forming swirling scenarios that are fragmented and multi-layered. Figures are evanescent and transcendental, referencing spiritual imagery where fluid bodies collide, disperse, swim, fly or fall. Bonafini’s work expands the possibilities of painting, tapestry and sculpture and their interrelationships. Holistic perspectives are developed in close dialogue with architecture, where space is approached as an extension to the work to envelop the viewer. Acting as protected spheres, Bonafini’s installations are openings to encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly.

Read more about Bea Bonafini here