Commissioned Catalogue Essay: Bonnie-Jean Whitlock’s "Apophenie Junk Pile"
- Scarlet Thomas
- Jul 1
- 4 min read
Apophenie Junk Pile — Catalogue Essay
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock
Red Gallery, Fitzroy North, June 18 - July 4
Bonnie’s paintings do not begin from representation so much as sensation. Their surfaces register movement through material: pigment absorbed into linen, wax resisting ink, and salt redistributing colour into unpredictable formations. In conversation, Bonnie described her process as collaborative with materials — an ongoing negotiation between intention and response in which materials redirect gestures and introduce moments of resistance, delay, and transformation. Linen remains loosely stretched and responsive, while surfaces are repeatedly reworked by hand. Through these processes, the paintings resist becoming fixed images and instead retain evidence of their own making.
Underlying this material process is a sustained engagement with the body — not as something directly depicted but as something distributed across surfaces. During her Masters of Fine Art, Bonnie developed a body mapping process that involved lying across fabric and tracing the shape of her body to capture bodily experience into material form. Different colours, shapes and lines corresponded to sensations, emotional states, and moments of bodily awareness. Fabric became less a support than a site of registration: a surface capable of holding memory, touch, and time.
That relationship continues through the current work. Brushstrokes remain visible and raw; pigment stains seep through the reverse of the linen, embedding themselves into the material rather than resting on top of it. Looking at the back of the paintings becomes almost as revealing as viewing the front. The works do not conceal their process — they expose accumulation, absorption, and change.
There is a geological quality to this approach. Bonnie spoke about rocks, lichen, layering, and the experience of remaining steady within a shifting world. Her paintings move in a similar way: building slowly through deposits of gesture and material interaction. Feelings emerge indirectly, often through repetition and extended duration rather than immediate expression.
What emerges is a practice grounded in tactility and embodied attention. These works do not present a sanitised or detached image of experience; instead they ask what painting can hold. Sensation becomes sedimented into surfaces. Touch remains visible. The work becomes less an image than a record — of contact, resistance, and the ongoing conversation between body and material.
Within the context of Apophenie Junk Pile, these paintings can be understood as part of a process of accumulation and reworking where materials and gestures are continually reconnected, reinterpreted and held in relation. Meaning emerges through these unstable linkages — through the same logic of apophenia that draws connections across fragments, residues and dispersed sensations.
Reflection
Earlier this year, I visited Bonnie-Jean Whitlock in her studio in the lead-up to her exhibition Apophenie Junk Pile. The visit offered an intimate insight into her working process, where she spoke generously about the material logics underpinning her practice — including wax resist techniques, salt dispersal, pigment absorption, and the ongoing responsiveness of linen as a surface.
Following this studio visit, Bonnie commissioned me to write a catalogue essay for the exhibition. The writing developed directly from our conversation and from observing the ways her paintings operate through material negotiation rather than fixed representation. It became an opportunity to think closely about how her practice holds sensation, memory, and bodily experience within processes of making that remain visibly unresolved.
The essay considers Bonnie’s paintings as sites where material and body are deeply entangled, though not in a direct or illustrative sense. Instead, the works register bodily presence through indirect means: through staining, layering, resistance, and transformation. Pigment seeps into linen, wax interrupts flow, and salt redistributes colour across the surface, producing compositions that feel responsive and alive rather than controlled.
Bonnie also discussed her earlier body mapping work developed during her Masters of Fine Art, where fabric became a surface for tracing bodily sensation. Lying across cloth, she translated emotional and physical states into colour and gesture, creating works where the body is present as trace rather than figure. This relationship continues to shape her current paintings, where surfaces act as sites of registration for touch, time, and movement.
There is a geological sensibility that runs through the work — a sense of layering, erosion, and accumulation that echoes natural processes such as sedimentation or the growth of lichen. The paintings unfold slowly, building through repeated gestures and material interactions that resist resolution. Rather than offering immediate visual clarity, they hold time within their surfaces.
Ultimately, the essay positions Bonnie’s practice as one grounded in tactility and embodied attention. These are works that do not present a detached or sanitised image of experience. Instead, they ask what painting can hold when understood as a record of contact — where sensation becomes embedded within material, and where touch remains visible long after the moment of making.
Within the broader context of Apophenie Junk Pile, the works can also be understood as part of an ongoing process of accumulation and reworking, where meaning emerges through fragmented connections between material, gesture, and sensation. In this sense, the exhibition itself operates through a similar logic of apophenia — drawing relationships between dispersed elements to form shifting, unstable readings of experience.
It was a pleasure to engage closely with her practice and to consider how writing can extend the material and conceptual concerns of an exhibition beyond the gallery space.
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