Output details

'Camera: How to be holy'/'Camera: Stigmata'

This exhibition featured the work of eight artist scholars and fellows marking the completion of Bonnell’s Photoworks Senior Research Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Ten photographs were displayed in the Sainsbury Gallery with two images from an earlier series, the 2008 ‘Ordinary Magic,’ featured in the Yearbook. The body of work produced in Rome April - June 2011 contributed to thorough analyses of Bonnell’s practice-led research over a thirty-year period.

The key contribution of the research is ‘Wilful Amateurism’, a term coined by Bonnell to describe an aesthetic comparable to the aesthetics of play and boundary transgression found in artists such as Duchamp and Hannah Höch. ‘Wilful Amateurism,’ in this output, as in outputs 2 and 4, intends the agglutination of sculpture and performance apprehended as photography. The methodology incorporates bricolage-oriented syntheses of spaces, places, objects, performances and absurdities intended to fictionalise all of the source materials (blog entries demonstrate these processes).

The Roman work’s impetus is manifest as a desire for the images to be ‘entered’ when the space between reality and fantasy is rendered as experiential. The work in the Yearbook is an ongoing research into human behaviour focused on the experiential aspects of fear and superstition. This avenue was further pursued as research into the Roman Catholic faith and its antecedents that emphasised Roman and Etruscan cultures. Related works in this area include ‘Camera:How to be Holy,’ self-images enacting religious gesture, and ‘Camera:Stigmata,’ images showing the re-enactment of five versions of St Catherine of Sienna receiving the stigmata.