Guest Speaker: Sian Bonell

Bonell's practice functions within a paradoxical space between sculpture, performance and photography. It is made manifest through her own lived domestic experience and is fuelled by the following characteristics: Play, imagination, dysfunction, irreverence, absurdity and fiction.

Alongside this, Bonell shared her experience and journey through her artistic photography career and outlines some amazing advice for up-coming practitioners.

One piece of advice that Bonell shared with us was "If you get ideas, no matter how daft those ideas are, follow through always because you just don't know what's going to happen." and I personally believe that this is such a great piece of advice as overthinking can prevent this from happening, although someone's 'daft' idea maybe someone else's 'greatest' idea.

Furthermore, one project in particular that caught my attention when creating my own project was 'St Catherine', this project focuses of reperforming gestures of Saint Dominic's nine manners of prayer. This was quite interesting to me as she using herself in a performative manner to recreate an act of element that has already happened.

This then made me consider my own work as within my creative surrealism, myself and models used are represented in a performative manner as such. Alongside this, it's a consideration towards acting, positioning and becoming the 'character' when in front of the camera, the clothes are a costume and the space is a stage. All elements are just as important as each other when constructing the perfect moment.

Sian has definitely inspired me to consider more on representation of performance, gestures as well as clothing and space when creating artistic images and most definitely her advice to not overthink or categorise an idea as 'daft'.

Check out her artistic photography and other amazing projects she has created over the years.

Sian Bonnell

Harley Kelly.