BONITA ALICE

I have always worked in both 2 and 3 dimensions, although I’m probably primarily a sculptor. 

The thread that runs through my practice, linking various bodies of work, series, and mediums, concerns the transience of all things and the fundamental fragility of my own species. 

My images have often focused on other animals, reflecting my primary concern - our relationship with the non-human world. My true subject, however, is human dysfunction, particularly with respect to the effects of our having forced a separation between ourselves and the rest of the natural world. In so doing, having projected our internal chaos onto the external landscape, we have become dangerous to other species; and have ourselves become lost without the essential guiding framework that comes with recognizing our responsibilities in a shared environment. 

Horses and dogs feature strongly in my work since it is with those species that we traditionally have had the closest emotional bonds ..and consequently, have become especially dangerous in our inconsistency. 

My visual references are most often, traditions in Japanese, Chinese, and Indian painting and printmaking where even the harshest and most violent subjects are rendered decoratively, thus sharpening the pain of the subject. A theme common, for instance, in Japanese Art and belief, is that destructive events in nature are linked to unresolved emotional dynamics of individuals and peoples. Hokusai’s Wave, we know, is not just water.