Lorraine Bonner turned to art late in life, as a way of dealing with personal trauma. She soon recognized the parallels between the betrayal and violence she had suffered in childhood and the betrayal and violent plunder that form the foundation of our current way of life. Her work has moved from depictions of personal/political betrayal, in the Perpetrator series, to a vision of humanity beyond the limitations of socially defined “color” in the Multi-Hued Humanity series. She is now working on a series she calls the Mended series, in which our scars and broken places take on a new beauty.
Lorraine Bonner lives and works in Oakland, California, close to her children and grandchildren.
We live in a society in which wounding is unavoidable. We are told that this is normal, but it is possible to imagine a different sort of society, one more in keeping with the original intent of social living, in which we care for one another, practice altruism and empathy, and are both trusting and trustworthy. Our wounds and scars are the measure of how far from this “Beloved Community” we are, the places where our need for compassion and witness comes up against the bullwhip and branding iron of the sociopathic plutocracy.
These scars are no cause for shame. They represent what is most human in us. In her series, “Mended” Lorraine Bonner transforms these broken places into patterns of light, not flaws, but proof of the tender vulnerability of the human heart.
