Gwenyth Chao

Gwenyth Chao (b. Tkaronto/ Toronto) is a Canadian artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice invokes composting as a metaphor-process-material to reimagine bodies and worlds that may emerge in potential futures. Her experiments speculate that the next materials – for sustenance, building, creative endeavors – will be made of reconstituted debris. Researching food-refuse-turned-biomaterial, the ingestibility of Chao’s sculptural installations gestures to her way of sense-making with a convalescing body in this time of ecological crises. Chao transplants thinking processes, misuses making techniques and retrofits tools from gastronomy cooking, ceramic coil building, 3D printing, food science, pastry cake decorating, and polymer chemistry among others. Her transdisciplinary process explores the possibilities for a necessarily emergent practice to be informed by an ecological awareness.

Chao has exhibited work in galleries across Canada, including a recent solo exhibition compos(t)ing spaces at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. She is a fellowship recipient at the Vermont Studio Center, a contributing artist in the Leaning Out of Windows IV art and science project and an Artist-Researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work has been funded by the Ontario Arts Council, the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

MFA, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

B.A. in Studio Art, University of Guelph

“Making with and Thinking Through Compost”, Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 3(2). 2022.