Bonita Ely

Wedge, 1992

Published by Viridian Press

This work features a timeline of human culture interlaced with images of wedge-forms. Almost conspiratorially, we are invited to imagine the whole of human history as a reflection of the evolution of wedge-based technology.

"So what I was playing around with was the idea that our knowledge is made up of things we definitely feel we know, things that are unknown — that we don't know yet, and things we'll never know — the unknowable. I was exploring the kinds of paradigm that our cultures construct with such certainty, but which really are so flawed . . . Intimate memory, as well as historical or cultural memory, seems so much a part of our knowledge, and yet it's not given the validity of official histories, that are often so much constructed fictions." - Bonita Ely interviewed by Cathy Leahy, 2000

Wedge is illustrated in Cathy Leahy, Spitting and Biting: Ten Contemporary Artists and the Print, exhibition catalogue (Melbourne: Monash University Gallery, 19 September - 28 October 2000), p. 13. The related series Histories (1992) is illustrated in Charles Green, Peripheral Visions: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 (Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1995), pp. 23 and 153.