Bronwyn Holloway-Smith is a New Zealand artist and author from Wellington. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Massey University, and is co-director of Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand.
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith | |
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| Born | Bronwyn Smith 1982[citation needed] Lower Hutt |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
| Alma mater | Massey University |
| Website | hollowaysmith |
Early life and education
editHolloway-Smith graduated from Massey University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) in 2006.[1] She completed her PhD at Massey University's Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts in 2018.[2]
Career
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She describes herself as interested in "internet culture, 3-dimensional printing, open source art, and space colonisation."[3] She edited the book WANTED: The search for the modernist murals of E. Mervyn Taylor, published in 2018.[4][5]
Advocacy for the Creative Freedom Foundation
editHolloway-Smith was involved in setting up the organisation Creative Freedom Foundation in 2008. The foundation seeks to "encourage and promote New Zealand artists' views on issues that have the potential to influence their collective creativity" such as copyright law. She was the director of the Creative Freedom Foundation until 2014.[6][7]
In 2009, she presented a petition on behalf of 149 people requesting "that the House of Representatives immediately repeal section 92A of the Copyright Act 1994 (to be inserted by the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008), or delay its commencement."[8] The petition was a culmination of the New Zealand Internet Blackout, and was presented to Parliament by Peter Dunne.
Ghosts in the Form of Gifts (2009)
editMassey University commissioned Holloway-Smith to produce an artwork for permanent display on their Wellington campus. The university's College of Creative Arts building on Buckle Street used to be occupied by the National Museum of New Zealand.[9] The museum moved out to become Te Papa.[10] Holloway-Smith imagined museum pieces,[9] most of them of culturally significant to the peoples of the Pacific,[11] that might have been lost or hidden during the move.[9]
The work Ghosts in the Form of Gifts (2009) was a collection of ten replacement pieces created with an open design RepRap 3D printer.[9] Three of the originals were from the natural world: a cicada in flight, a sperm whale tooth,[10] and a giant snail shell. The rest were man made and, with one exception, generic and of unknown origin. Holloway-Smith called them "orphaned works".[9] They included a Māori matua (English: fish hook) and poi, a tapa cloth beater and an adze.[9] The exception was the Utah teapot, a virtual object with a well documented origin and purpose, that was made physical for the collection. As an artistic gift, Holloway-Smith offered the 3D printer instruction files for the collection from her official website under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.[9]
In 2010, Ghosts in the Form of Gifts won the Open Source in the Arts category at the New Zealand Open Source Awards.[11] The work toured, and in 2012 it was reviewed for EyeContact Magazine by artist and writer Peter Dornauf while exhibited at RAMP, Hamilton.[12] Dornauf wrote that common, perhaps mundane, museum pieces had been transformed by 3D printing. The replacements "... present themselves as highly tactile yet prohibit touch because of their strange translucent ghostly nature."[10] The work also raised questions. Holloway-Smith asked "Is something a sculpture if you print it out from a machine?"[9] And Dornauf linked the open sourcing of the instructions to the issue of authorship.[10]
Pioneer City (2011)
editIn 2011, Holloway-Smith produced a series of works exploring the possibility of settling Mars. As part of this project, she won a competition to erect a billboard on Ghuznee Street, Wellington, advertising "Pioneer City" on Mars.[13] The intention behind the work was to explore how the real estate industry has aimed its marketing at people's aspirations, and how residential developments are sometimes utopian:
"We have seen this with the boom in inner-city apartment living in the past decade. We saw it in the 19th century in the way the New Zealand Company sold a romanticised picture of New Zealand to prospective settlers before they’d visited the country. My project responds to this kind of marketing in the inner city and draws attention to its timelessness".[13]
A website was also produced.[14]
Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand (PAHANZ)
editPAHANZ "... is a research initiative to find, document and protect [the nations's] 20th century public art heritage.", according to their website.[15] At Massey University's Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Holloway-Smith and Sue Elliott's research into the murals of E. Mervyn Taylor developed into an informal register of public art.[16][17] By the late 2010s, PAHANZ planned to make the register accessible through their website.[18] In the early 2020s, the initiative received $300,000 from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage's innovation fund to put the register on the web and establish a forum for those working with public art to share resources and best practice.[19][20] The national register of 20th century public art was launched on the PAHANZ website in July 2023.[16]
As of June 2024,[update] the register on the web lists 388 works. Each work has a current status for the viewing public: accessible, hidden or lost (whereabouts unknown or destroyed). The public is invited to submit further works for registration and further information about selected works whose details are incomplete.[21]
References
edit- ^ "Bronwyn Holloway - Smith". CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand. 3 January 2012. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
- ^ Holloway-Smith, Bronwyn (2018). The Southern Cross cable : a tour : art, the internet and national identity in Aotearoa-New Zealand (Doctoral thesis). Massey Research Online, Massey University. hdl:10179/14941.
- ^ "Bronwyn Holloway-Smith". 18 July 2012. Archived from the original on 13 August 2017. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
- ^ "10 questions with Bronwyn Holloway-Smith | Massey University Press". www.masseypress.ac.nz. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
- ^ "Review: WANTED: The search for the modernist murals of E. Mervyn Taylor, edited by Bronwyn Holloway-Smith". Stuff. 21 April 2018. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
- ^ "Resume Curriculum Vitae". bronwyn.co.nz. Archived from the original on 19 December 2014. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
- ^ "About Us". creativefreedom.org.nz.
- ^ "Petition of Bronwyn Holloway-Smith and 148 others". parliament.govt.nz.
- ^ a b c d e f g h O'Neill, Rob (27 January 2010). "3D Printer Deployed for the Cause of Art". Computerworld: New Zealand. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
- ^ a b c d Dornauf, Peter (6 May 2012). "Glancing at the History of Digital Art". EyeContact. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
- ^ a b "2010 Winners and Finalists". New Zealand Open Source Awards. 2010. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
- ^ "Writers". EyeContact Magazine. n.d. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
- ^ a b "A second public art billboard project". bartley + company art. 28 March 2011. Archived from the original on 1 September 2011. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
- ^ "Pioneer-City.com". 1 January 2011. Retrieved 1 January 2011.
- ^ "Haere mai!". Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand. n.d. Retrieved 10 June 2024.
- ^ a b "Safeguarding 20th Century Artwork in Aotearoa from Disappearing". Afternoons. 26 July 2023. Radio New Zealand. RNZ National. Retrieved 6 June 2024.
- ^ "About". Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand. n.d. Archived from the original on 29 November 2019. Retrieved 10 June 2024.
- ^ "Public Art Register". Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand. n.d. Archived from the original on 29 November 2019. Retrieved 10 June 2024.
- ^ "Innovation Fund Recipients". Ministry for Culture and Heritage. 20 September 2023. Retrieved 7 June 2024.
- ^ "Discovering and Protecting Our Public Art". Rangahau: Research at Massey. No. 4. Wellington: Massey University. 2022. Retrieved 10 June 2024.
- ^ "Artworks". Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand. n.d. Retrieved 6 June 2024.
External links
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