Joshua Bonson b. 1988 Darwin, Australia
Skin 2015 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas 170 x 120 x 5cm
Joshua Bonson is a painter who shares stories of his Indigenous heritage through his work. He began experimenting with paint in his senior school years, creating textured black-and-white paintings in acrylics in what he describes as a 3D style. Bonson applies paint thickly in his own version of a dot-painting technique, creating works that are contemporary in appearance yet embody age-old Indigenous traditions and meanings. Bonson explains: ‘The idea is to recreate the scales of a saltwater crocodile, which my grandfather told me is my totem. I try to express myself through my totem, the flow of the water, landscape as well as the scales.’ But the process works on different levels: ‘It can be read as a close-up of a reptile’s skin, and as a landscape both seen from a distance and as close-up details of rocks and sand’. ‘My great grandmother was from Badu in the Torres Strait Islands and her eldest son was my grandfather, Donald Bonson, senior’, Bonson says. ‘He always told me everything is connected, the land, the water and us. Like the crocodile we are saltwater people with an ancient lineage.’
For two years running, at age 18 and 19, Bonson was the youngest finalist in the annual National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. At 22, he won the Togart Contemporary Art Award (2011). In 2013, he was a finalist again in the 30th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Indigenous Art Award, the City of Albany Art Prize Western Australia and Winner of the Top End NAIDOC Visual Artist of the year. In 2014 he held his first solo exhibition internationally and was also awarded the Young Achievers Award NT, Artist of the Year 2014. Represented by ReDot Gallery, Singapore.
the churchie national emerging art prize 2015
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