Gwynneth is a writer and editor from Ōtautahi Christchurch who recently became the librarian at Christchurch Women’s Prison.
Writing essays since the mid-1990s, her practice has involved persistent experimentation with forms, methodologies and subject positions – auto-theory, ficto-criticism and dialogue – for art writing and book development with artists.
With a long history of collaborations with artists in publication situations and artist-run projects, she has a working background in art school teaching, visual arts publishing, and art museum curatorial and public programmes work.
She recently completed a PhD through Monash University in Melbourne’s Department of Art History and Theory with a thesis titled ‘Delinquent palaces: Adolescent museum visitation in literature.’
As an editor, with designer Warren Olds, she started and ran Clouds publishing, an art-book press based in Tāmaki Auckland.
Gwynneth is currently working on a monograph on the work of the artist Ani O’Neill, and a collection of parallel essays from within a friendship with Melbourne art theorist Jan Bryant. On smoking, a Manet painting of a melon, suicide, peace, apostasy, dead labour, and a found photograph of a woman in a suit, they attend to how being and care emerge from the act of reading.
Visit gwynnethporter.net for selected recent essays.