Research Catalogue

Penny Leong Browne is an artist and writer living in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Geography from the University of British Columbia, a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Applied Arts, both from Emily Carr University (Vancouver, Canada). She has exhibited both locally and internationally and has published critical writings and text works in Canada, Austria, United States and Hong Kong. Her current focus is on the methodology and aesthetics of creativity and its representation and materialization as artefacts for study. Adopting a research-oriented approach towards art, she joins theory with practice and considers the process of thinking and making is equally as important as what is produced. She explores these lines of enquiry through computational art, virtual phenomenon, participatory installations and more recently, in drawing and assemblage sculptures. Her present work extends from research conducted during a six week thematic residency  at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada). Led by Saul Ostrow and Charles Tucker, the residency titled "Analogous Fields in Art and Science" joined together artists and scientists through studio/lab work and research presentations that explored commonalities between the arts and sciences in the areas of research and creativity within methodological practice, interdisciplinary discourse within post-human ontologies and aesthetics. Current projects include a series of drawings titled, "Faltering Methodologies"  that explore the unstable and often indeterminate nature of methodology in creative practice. Here, the process enacted through the tactile act of drawing is guided within parameters that she designs as methodological systems. The disruptions, interruptions and slippages that occur within these systems, caused by the variability of creative production prone to chance, intuition, progressions or digressions become visually evidenced in the drawings.  Other ongoing projects, "Tracing Matter" and "Precious Salvage" reclaim domestic and personal objects that position the ready-made as artefacts for creative research. "Tracing Matter" are layered tracings of digital photographs taken of silver objects and other semi-precious antiques acquired from second-hand sources.  "Precious Salvage" salvages used, domestic objects from community online networks and assembles them into what she calls "precious objects for social contemplation"