ANNA BONSHEK
Anna Bonshek’s art celebrates the creative impulse and the joy of making the invisible visible. An award-winning artist based on the Gold Coast, Anna draws inspiration from the resonance of place. She works with diverse materials, including wood, stone, fallen tree remnants, and wire, and has a passion for painting on canvas and printmaking. Anna’s sculptures, crafted from local materials, explore natural cycles and structural concepts. Her captivating installations have been featured at the Swell Sculpture Festival in 2011, 2019, and 2023.
‘Play’ is a colorful installation exploring structure, architectural form, space, and environment. Wood and stone are the favoured materials. Raw logs, along with sawn and constructed frames – dressed and painted – create a delightful array of interconnected elements, all reliant on each other. Interrelated and interdependent by virtue of weight, structure, and recurring shape, the overall piece creates a lively dynamic play – unity of engaging elements.
Can you describe your creative process from concept to completion?
For me, I have an idea or visual image that comes into my mind, my consciousness. It’s like a picture on a screen. Then I consider how that would translate into something concrete. I often make a drawing or sketch. That initial conceptualisation can include materials and all sorts of detail. Since I work in different media, an idea is not always confined to the same process, and it could be made into three- or two-dimensions. The process of transferring the image or idea to an external work takes place over time, with refinements on the way. I could be working with wood, or stone, or painting, drawing, or print media, or using imagery captured on my phone. One thing that underlies all this is that it automatically comes from a deep impulse to create.
Where do you look for inspiration? What themes do you find most interesting?
Nature, knowledge, insight and happiness are sources of inspiration. The themes that engage me are patterns in life, cycles and relationship in the environment, abstract conception that emerges into an embodied experience and stories.
What role does location or environment play in your sculptures?
In my sculptural work, location and environment are something that are inherent often within the materials themselves. Wood that has come from a growing organic thing, from our locality, our place. It may have had a life for tens or hundreds of years. Stone can be formed over millions of years. Coming from a place where creatures have evolved, where transformation has occurred on our earth, waters, all in relation to the movement of the planets, constellations, the life of the universe. Our environment is a living, breathing field of diversity, life, systems, transformation and changing phenomena and worlds. Respect for place, for site, for the environment that supports us is very important.
How do you feel when you see people interacting with your sculptures?
It’s very fulfilling to see people’s reactions, hear their comments, to see how someone brings a whole world of inner experience and memories to engaging with an installation. It is very exciting, enriching, adding much more to the work.
Describe your dream project.
A dream project would involve, ideally having unlimited resources, facilitating a monumental, permanent installation acknowledging materiality of site, in ancient stone, specific arrangement, the appearance of nature’s design in placement, paying homage to cosmic forces, in a humble celebration of existence and place. Such a project could extend on out from considerations in my earlier work Jyoti, featured at Swell Sculpture Festival 2023, which honoured the presence of local rock, sandstone, trees and wood, and the liveliness of silence with respect to site.
Come and see for yourself at SWELL Sculpture Festival, Pacific Parade, Currumbin 6th – 15th September.