Sian Bonnell

Sian Bonnell is a UK based artist, living and working in Devon. Her artistic practice aims to challenge our ideas around the nature of art and its subject-matter.

Working with available objects and spaces, Bonnell sees her camera as a “partner in crime – my provocateur; it dares me to do things. In this way it becomes a magical agent. Point a camera at any child, they will play up, show off, pull faces and adults will pose. All of this is performance, the camera demands it – and we are complicit.” Her images have been exhibited and published widely both in the UK and internationally. Bonnell’s work is held in several major collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2009 she was awarded HonFRPS and in 2011 awarded Senior Research Fellowship at The British School at Rome.

Bonnell established TRACE, the curation and publishing project in 1999, curating exhibitions in the UK and internationally including the National Photography Gallery in Gdansk, Poland and in a series of exhibitions featuring UK graduate photography at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China between 2014-2019. Artist books published under the imprint TRACE Editions include Wild Track by Mark Haworth-Booth, Imagine Finding Me by Chino Otsuka and Villa Mona by Marjolaine Ryley.

She was Associate Professor in Photography at Falmouth University from 2009-2016 Reader in Photography at Manchester School of Art, and later Reader in Wilful Amateurism at Manchester Fashion Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University from 2016-2021.
Her monograph Wilful Amateur published in 2025 presents an overview of her practice from 1978 to the present. Arranged non-chronologically the book brings together early and later works into new correspondence.

https://www.sianbonnell.com/