Penny joins us for our eighth residency – she is an Art Historian having held roles in public art galleries in New Zealand.
The author of Edward Bullmore: A Surrealist Odyssey (2008) and The Brown Years: Nigel Brown (2009), she has contributed to The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and several journals including Art New Zealand, Art Monthly Australia, Studies in Travel Writing, Journal of Art Crime and Katherine Mansfield Studies.
As a curator, Penny is perhaps best known for her work with writer and illustrator, Lynley Dodd, having curated three exhibitions that have toured across New Zealand and Australia. She also curated the popular Corrugations: the art of Jeff Thomson (2013) which won the 2013 Exhibition of the Year under $20K Museums Aotearoa.
Penny is the Chair of the New Zealand Art Crime Research Trust and in 2016 contributed a chapter to Art Crime and Its Prevention (Lund Humphries). In 2016 her book Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters: The New Zealand Story (Awa Press) was published. Her latest book, Females in the Frame: Women, Art, and Crime (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 2019. She is based in Tauranga.
Penny’s residency project is a non-fiction book that explores the copying of art. It will be a collective study of copies and how they raise questions around copyright and intellectual property. Inspired by copies located in New Zealand, and Australia, examples are contextualised within an international perspective. Content scopes the historical and contemporary, both at home and abroad. Copying, and the study of it, offers an alternative art history.