About Penny Byrne
Penny Byrne is a Melbourne-based artist whose work is deeply engaged in the world of contemporary political and social affairs. Byrne utilises a variety of mediums to produce sculptural works that express shock and outrage at our apathetic responses to atrocities around the world. Byrne creates work that asks us to reflect upon the way in which we passively consume images from the daily news and our social media feeds, turning away or flicking past when we are overwhelmed by the barbarities on view.
Byrne comes from a background in ceramics conservation. Vintage porcelain figurines form the foundation of many of her works. These are skillfully manipulated utilising her conservation skills to create new works that reference contemporary global crises, imbuing the figures with both humour and horror. The op shop and eBay sourced figures that Byrne reconfigures are often debased versions, produced in the twentieth century, of models that have their origins in the eighteenth century. These crudely sculpted, sub-rococo shepherds and shepherdesses are, for many, the epitome of kitsch. But the eighteenth-century tradition of small-scale porcelain sculpture from which these modern figures derive was deeply embedded in elite political discourses of the day. The subject matter of eighteenth-century porcelain figures dealt with ideas and concerns of great import to the absolutist courts responsible for their manufacture. By reinserting porcelain figurines into contemporary cultural and political debate, Byrne not only confounds our expectations about objects often dismissed as ‘bad art’, but also succeeds in breathing new life into a venerable artform, stripping back some of its outdated politics and colonial assumptions, and giving it an urgent contemporary voice.
Thank you to Dr Matthew Martin, Senior Lecturer - Art History and Curatorship, The University of Melbourne, for writing this artist biography.
She was born in Mildura in regional Australia in 1965, and now lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne.
She works in close collaboration with Urban Arts Projects to create her large scale bronze works.
