In this conversation, artist and educator Gwenyth Chow discusses her innovative approach to art that emphasizes ecological sustainability and the transformation of food waste into creative materials. She shares insights into her experimental processes, the challenges and joys of working with organic materials, and the importance of community engagement in her practice. Gwenyth discusses her ‘materials library’, where she documents her findings and recipes for others to replicate. This episode highlights the potential of art to address global challenges and inspire new ways of thinking about materials and consumption.
Artist’s Bio: Gwenyth Chao’s practice invokes composting as a metaphor-process-material to (re)imagine bodies that may emerge in potential futures. The microworlds in her sculptural installations are situated in depleted sites across our exhausted planet in a time after the age of capitalist extraction. Chao’s experiments speculate that the materials – for sustenance, building, creative endeavors – of our near futures will be made of reconstituted debris. Researching food-refuse-turned-biomaterial, the ingestibility of her work probes at how convalescent bodies make sense of their palliative condition on a damaged planet. Her process explores the possibilities for a necessarily emergent practice to be informed by an ecological awareness. Chao transplants thinking processes, misuses making techniques and retrofits tools from different knowledge bodies to ask: how can transdisciplinary practices disrupt hegemonic ways of thinking and destabilize how knowledge is constructed, valued and transmitted?
Chao has had solo exhibitions at Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Science World (Vancouver, BC) and the Centre culturel Georges-Vanier (Montreal, QC) among others. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada including the Design TO Festival (Toronto, ON), the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, ON) and University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC). Chao was a fellowship recipient at Vermont Studio Center, an artist-in-residence at the Banff Center and an Artist-Researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Emerging Artist Exchange program. Her projects have been funded by the Ontario Arts Council, BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Links:
Artists website: www.gwenythc.com
Instagram: @ponderare