Artist Statement

The dangerous veil between life and death is where you will find the visual world of artist Violet Bond.

Forever edging towards the macabre, Bond seeks the dark places, deep waters where eery discomfort and exposed truths live side by side.

Here she asks of her audience nothing less than self examination in their relationship with brutally colonised environments. Her philosophical approach to art making questioning the difference between connection to place and connection to country.

Believing that “people find it difficult to want to protect what they’re not connected to”, she hopes her work offers a lens into what the beautiful and harsh Australian history and landscapes represent.

A childhood in the remote Arnhem Land bush, witnessing First Nations peoples intrinsic interconnectness with land, birthed a fascination in Bond which largely informs the foundation of her artistic investigation.

How do we connect to ‘place’ as visitors, while fostering our own deep love and appreciation, being taught the lessons that can only come from the wisdom of nature and the indiscriminate living, dying and rebirthing that sustains it.

Furthermore, how has the colonised modern world distanced us from our own deep knowing of such wisdom that lies stirring in our own DNA from lifetimes gone by?

Bonds work shows a commitment to the idea of collaborating with nature, not only as a muse, but as a co-conspirator in the telling of it’s own rich stories expressed through sun bleached bones, fire and ash, dirt and mud. Layers of life’s decay and rise.

Giving parts of herself to her artistic practice has become somewhat of a rite of passage in her process as she deepens into co-relating with the wild. Committing to the idea that to take something you must give something.

In her own words, “to the point now, where if I’m making work and don’t get injured or have sacrificed my body in some way, I feel I haven’t gone far enough down the road. In a way, I offer that blood, that cut, that suffocation, to the performance art gods.”

In the truest sense, Bond work is a response to the world she finds herself within at any one time as she immerses herself delicately into landscapes that are already living breathing artworks, changing with the seasons and the light of the skies. Her work gifting us glimpses of this wonder.