Aldeth Spence Christy, p2

 

... that much. For the last fifteen years of her life, she attempted to keep a body of her work as a personal collection, reasoning that this offered the best chance for others to see it in the future, and to witness some of the breadth of her interest and view.

 

Bunny created images in paper and crayon, pen and ink on paper, and fabric collage, and kept a personal journal for over three decades. Her work is held by several institutions and a number of private individuals (two large pieces occupy the front wall of the lobby of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters in Rockville, MD).

 

She regarded herself a classicist in art, and her images were carefully worked. She used a personal vocabulary of symbols that included birds, fishes, turtles, cows and flowers, often within a central image surrounded by fields of color or patterns. Usually there was one image or more of herself, and she nearly always drew her husband John as a black bird. Why the bird motif? It allowed a freedom of expression which might have been more problematic with a human form, she sometimes explained. For many years she wore long black hair and often drew the black bird as her hair, for example, sometimes giving the bird extra wings or an unusual shape which suited the demands of the piece. For themes she used events from her life, for she felt that the emotional authority that arose from them offered her best chance of producing undeniable, satisfying, and resolved visual works.