Anna Bonshek, Dreaming of Hampi, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
Anna Bonshek
Gallery 2
Opening Thursday 2 July, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 3 July - Sunday 26 July
Anna Bonshek’s exhibition Friends includes artwork that in different ways evokes the idea of connection and relationship. Her sculptural installations of playful wood pieces, created from locally harvested Ironbark and SheOak timber, invite the viewer to entertain whimsical objects that have a life of their own. Drawing inspiration from the potency of living trees, the bush, as an interconnected, interdependent ecosystem, this aspect of Friends speaks to interdependency, cooperation, and the mutual benefit of togetherness.
In another artwork, Anna Bonshek’s painting Dreaming of Hampi (India), made after a trip with friends to Vijayanagara, Karnataka, shows three friends dressed in sarees—one of fabric woven by Anegundi weavers which is an eco-friendly, biodegradable, banana fibre, from local plantation banana leaves. Here, figures float atop a banana tree, focussed around an architectural diagram. The composition references 16th-century artist, Sofonisba Anguissola’s painting “The Game of Chess” (1555), held in Poland’s National Gallery of Poznań, where Anguissola’s sisters, Lucia, Europa and Minerva enjoy intellectual pursuit. Minerva’s hand is raised. Likewise, in Bonshek’s painting, her friend’s hand is raised, catching the viewer’s attention, inviting a Dreaming of Hampi.
The theme of friendship, as explored in this exhibition by Anna Bonshek, as with her work in general, provides rich layers of meaning. Manu P. Sobti comments that Bonshek ”creates an archive of memory—a memory bank, a memory palace—which she embellishes and feeds into her work”, and she incorporates “rhythms and cycles…. The rhythm of nature, the rhythm of human beings, the rhythm of an activity; rhythms that are larger and smaller, rhythms that are not always apparent, sometimes rhythms that collide with each other.” Friends invites the viewer to pause, reflect and enjoy.
About the Artist
Anna Bonshek is an award-winning (RSA, NEA, ISEA), Gold Coast, multi-media artist whose projects explore connections between the organic and constructed world, between natural cycles and the enduring presence, or fleeting trace, of structure and life.“Enhancing the spectator’s experience of refined consciousness” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe), Anna’s art centres around creativity, and notions of non-materiality that transform and inhabit form and space.
Creating art in Australia, the USA and UK, Bonshek’s multimedia work has featured internationally —India, Russia, South America. Her art celebrates the impulse to make the invisible visible and often draws inspiration from the resonance of place. Dealing with natural cycles and structural concepts, Bonshek uses diverse materials, creating projects of wood, stone, drawing, and painting, as well as video, performance, and architectural sculpture installations .
Bonshek has taught art, acted as a peer assessor, mentor, published and presented on her work, and is an editor on theory and art. She enjoys taking time to evolve the poetic mystery in art making. Bonshek’s installations featured at the Swell Sculpture Festival in 2011, 2019, and 2023, 2024, and 2025.