Description
Cecilia Bonilla is a multi disciplinary visual artist working with collage, installation, assemblage and video.
In her compositions Bonilla often appropriates mass-produced imagery from sources such as discarded books, fashion magazines and catalogues. Taking this existing imagery she subverts its original meaning through subtle alterations or amendments which reconfigure, pervert and dismantle the original image source. Throughout her work, themes of domesticity, the ideals of beauty, ‘life-style’, and other social constructs are questioned, corrupted and undermined through minimal, yet skilful assemblage and modification.
Education
2006-07 MA Fine Art Chelsea College of Art and Design, London
2003-04 Post graduate Diploma in Fine Art Chelsea College of Art and Design, Ldn
1996-99 AA Fine Art New World School of the Arts, Miami, Florida
1993-96 BA Graphic Design O.R.T. University, Montevideo, Uruguay
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Winter kept us warm
Cecilia Bonilla’s latest body of work Winter Kept Us Warm continues her exploration of the female image through strategies of appropriation and poetic disruption. Created during the waning days of winter, these collages merge fragments from discarded men’s magazines with imagery from nature encyclopaedias — transforming once-objectified female bodies into surreal hybrid figures cloaked in foliage, dwarfed by insects, or obscured by branches. Working with a magnetic board, Bonilla assembles her compositions slowly and intuitively, embracing collage as a medium uniquely suited to ambivalence — where conflicting ideas can inhabit the same frame. The title, drawn from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, speaks to a paradoxical refuge found in stillness and retreat: “Winter kept us warm,” Eliot writes, suggesting that numbness can be a form of protection. In these works, Bonilla similarly invokes a quiet resistance — salvaging imagery from a discarded visual culture and reanimating it into something defiant, intimate, and alive.
“I started making these collages towards the end of winter. I felt apprehensive about accepting the onset of spring; the idea of spending more time outside meant exposing myself to the world again, and I had found comfort in the stillness and reclusiveness of winter.
When making these unique works I use a magnetic board, where I temporarily place the images that I want to combine, allowing for multiple adjustments so that I can take my time to decide whether an image is successful or not. I feel that collage is a great medium to explore and express mixed emotions and conflicted feelings, as different and seemingly unrelated images can coexist as one.”
— Cecilia Bonilla, 2025
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“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
— The Waste Land, V. What the Thunder Said
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All Enquiries:
tom@opendoors.gallery
+44 (0)7769922824
