The Bonnet Series
Location: Alkgnirrweltye Community, Alice Springs NT
Participating communities: Snake Well, Sandy Bore, Gillen Bore, Burt Creek
Participating artists: Corey Thomas (Melbourne), Evert Tomlins (Alice Springs), Daniel King (Yuin)
The Bonnet Series is an ongoing collaborative art project uniting Indigenous participants from Central Australia with non-Indigenous participants from various parts of the country and abroad for creative workshops on country. The project focuses on direct participation and activation of communities around central Australia from the ground up.
Snakewell, a public sculpture in the central desert
The Bonnet Series has two key focus outcomes. Firstly, it aims to share practical trade skills such as metal-work, building and sculpture creation in a safe and culturally engaged space. Secondly, it aims to clean up remote central desert areas by either repairing or scrapping discarded vehicles dumped across the landscape and re-purposing the bonnets of each vehicle to create a sculptural legacy.
Aligning with Indigenous bush mechanics, and artists of various mediums, the team goes go on Country to locate discarded and dumped vehicles left out in the bush and maps them with GPS to identify parts that can be re-used. This creates an online library of parts for communities to swap and share in the future.
Then, visiting artists, tradespeople and makers facilitate workshops with the salvaged metal material. This process exchanges knowledge and new practical skills such as cutting, welding metal and large scale projects. The large snake sculpture at Snake Well is created from 78 car bonnets machined in elaborate ‘fans’ surging in an out of the landscape to appear as a three dimensional representation of the ancient top-down image of the snake.
After gleaning anything of worth, the non-repairable vehicle shells are then crushed. The dumped vehicles are removed from the natural landscape and any money that is left-over from the scrap metal after haulage is distributed to the families who own the vehicle.
The Bonnet Series Project directly engages young Central Desert people and encourages them to spend time on Country with their homeland community and express themselves creatively. It enables young people a safe space to heal, learn new practical skills that can be used for life and most significantly reconnect to Country and family.
