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Bronwyn Holloway-Smith

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Dr
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith
Born
Bronwyn Smith

1982 (age 41–42)[1]
Lower Hutt[2]
NationalityNew Zealand
Alma materMassey University
Websitehollowaysmith.nz

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith is a New Zealand artist, art researcher and advocate. She studied at Massey University in Wellington and received a doctorate in Fine Art from the College of Creative Arts (CoCA) Toi Rauwhārangi in 2019. Holloway-Smith often uses investigation and new technology in her work. The subject of her research and advocacy was intellectual property rights for artists; it is now 20th century public art. Holloway-Smith is co-director of Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand.

Working life

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In 2006,[citation needed] Holloway-Smith graduated with an honours degree in Fine Art from Massey University.[3][4]

Between degree and doctorate

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Creative Freedom Foundation

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Peter Dunne and Holloway-Smith face media outside Parliament House, first NZ Internet Blackout protest, 19 February 2009

In October 2008, the Copyright Act 1994 was amended by the Fifth Labour Government. The additions included section 92A that said "Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers".[5] It was due to come into force on 28 February 2009.[6] Holloway-Smith supported copyright law to protect the intellectual property of artists. However, she believed section 92A was unjust because it would allow Internet access to be terminated without a fair hearing.[7]

Late in 2008, Holloway-Smith founded the Creative Freedom Foundation (CFF), with her civil union partner, to campaign for the repeal of section 92A.[8] The foundation called for the first New Zealand Internet Blackout 16–23 February 2009 and organised petitions.[9] On 19 February, Holloway-Smith led around 200 protestors at parliament.[10] Peter Dunne MP received the petitions with over 10,000 virtual and 149 written signatures.[6][11]

The newly-elected Fifth National Government did not bring section 92A into force.[5] In July, they proposed an alternative that narrowed the scope to file sharing networks. Repeat copyright infringers would receive three warnings. Those would be followed by a hearing at the Copyright Tribunal that could result in a fine or termination of Internet access. Holloway-Smith said the proposal was "... much better than the previous regime, ..."[12] The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 repealed section 92A and added the new regime as section 122.[13]

In July 2014, Holloway-Smith stepped down from the CFF to start her doctorate, and the foundation went on hold.[14]

Ghosts in the Form of Gifts (2009)

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Substitute cicada

Massey University commissioned Holloway-Smith to produce artwork for display on their Wellington campus.[15] The CoCA building used to belong to the National Museum of New Zealand that moved out to become Te Papa.[15][16] Holloway-Smith imagined museum pieces that might have been lost in the move.[16]

Ghosts in the Form of Gifts (2009) was a collection of ten substitute pieces produced with an open design RepRap 3D printer. Natural and man-made pieces were represented in the collection. Holloway-Smith chose man-made pieces of generic type and unknown origin, "orphaned works" as she put it, with one exception. They included a Māori matau (English: fish hook) and poi, and a tapa cloth beater. The exception was not a physical piece but a 3D model whose origin was well known: the Utah teapot. Holloway-Smith gifted the 3D printer instructions for the collection from her official website under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.[15]

In 2010, Ghosts in the Form of Gifts won the Open Source in the Arts category at the New Zealand Open Source Awards.[17] In 2012, it was shown in Social Interface at Ramp Gallery, Hamilton,[18] and was reviewed by artist Peter Dornauf.[19] He wrote that everyday museum pieces had been transformed by 3D printing. The substitutes "... present themselves as highly tactile yet prohibit touch because of their strange translucent ghostly nature."[16]

Pioneer City (2010–2015)

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Pioneer City was a series of works on extra-terrestrial colonisation inspired by Holloway-Smith's interest in the exploration of Mars.

While searching for a house to buy in Wellington, Holloway-Smith noticed the marketing of real estate off plans. Advertisements lured buyers to property that was promised but not yet built.[20] In 2010, according to her official website, she parodied aspirational real estate advertising with a flyer for the imaginary Colonial Real Estate company's Pioneer development. Typical home interiors looked out over atypical landscapes: rugged, empty and lifeless.[21]

The following year, Holloway-Smith won the use of a Wellington city centre billboard for art from April to June. She created a marketing campaign to sell the idea of a better life in Pioneer City with advertisements on the billboard and a website.[22] The flyer and initial website only hinted at the location,[21][23] but Holloway-Smith soon confirmed they were set on Mars.[22] Her campaign drew inspiration from the marketing of New Zealand as a remote colony to European settlers in the 19th century.[20][24]

The campaign continued in the news and arts media with Holloway-Smith anticipating a Pioneer City showroom.[25][24] Located in Wellington city centre and open weekends 18 June–10 July 2011,[25] it had a scale model of the city with an agent to handle enquiries.[20] Expressions of interest could be made at the showroom or on the website. By this point, the website covered how the colony could be self-sustaining with further details on the lifestyle promised to settlers.[26]

A promotional video for the city was created in 2012.[27] The following year, the model and video were shown in Among the Machines at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. The theme of the exhibition was the evolving relationship between people, nature and technology.[28] One reviewer wrote Holloway-Smith's works were mildly satirical,[29] while another found them disquieting.[30]

During the 2015–2016 New Zealand flag referendums, Holloway-Smith created a flag for Pioneer City. It won the New Zealand Contemporary Art Award 2015, and a judge noted its immediacy.[31] As of 2024, this is the most recent work in the series.

Whisper Down the Lane (2012)

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The Obstinate Object: Contemporary New Zealand Sculpture ran at City Gallery Wellington February–June 2012.[32] Holloway-Smith's Whisper Down the Lane (2012) ran in parallel with the exhibition and combined her interests in intellectual property rights and 3D technologies.

Holloway-Smith picked one sculpture a week from the exhibition.[33] She discussed copyright issues with the artist then got permission to create a 3D model of the sculpture and 3D print the model as a miniature. The miniatures were sufficiently transformed from the originals that Holloway-Smith saw them as her works. She named them After ... the original artist and work in acknowledgement.[34] They were shown in the gallery's reading room and sold online.[33] Holloway-Smith gifted the 3D printer instructions for 12 miniatures from her official website under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Whisper Down the Lane was reviewed by art critic Mark Amery.[19] He wrote that it was "... one smart project, charged in its complexity by contemporary issues of copyright, reproduction and future changes to the art market."[33] It won the Open Source in the Arts category at the New Zealand Open Source Awards 2012.[35]

Doctorate

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Between 2014 and 2019, Holloway-Smith researched the effect of international, particularly American, leadership and control over the Internet on the national identity of New Zealand. She investigated the Southern Cross Cable (SX) then responded to it by creating a collection of conceptual artworks.[36] Commissioned in 2000, the SX was New Zealand's first international broadband cable.[37] Nearly all the nation's Internet traffic went through the SX until 2017.[38] It was built and operated by Spark New Zealand with partners Optus and Verizon from Australia and the United States respectively.[37] Holloway-Smith aimed to demystify the SX for the public by showing its route, physical nature and the limits of New Zealand's control.[39]

In 2014, Holloway-Smith visited Spark's landing stations in Northcote which connected domestic and international networks. The station for New Zealand's first international telephone cable, decommissioned in 1984, contained boxes of colourful ceramic tiles. They belonged to Te Ika-a-Maui (1962) (English: the fish of Māui) a mural created for the station by New Zealand artist E. Mervyn Taylor (1906–1964). Holloway-Smith's restoration of the mural included creating paintings of lost tiles,[40] and led to the E. Mervyn Taylor Mural Search and Recovery Project.

Arriving from Australia, the SX left the Tasman Sea at Muriwai. It went east through landing stations at Whenuapai and Northcote. Then it entered the Hauraki Gulf at Takapuna and crossed the Pacific Ocean to the United States.[41] In February 2017, Holloway-Smith proposed a work for each coastal and landing site.[42] However, Spark declined, saying public awareness of the landing stations could compromise their security.[43]

A revised collection of works was shown in This Is New Zealand at City Gallery Wellington March–July 2018.[44][45] They were:

  • The Southern Cross Cable: A Tour guide booklet with a two-page spread on each site followed by two pages on the work in the gallery for that site.[46] Radio New Zealand technology correspondent Sarah Putt completed the tour. She appreciated it for "... taking something in the technology world and bringing it alive through art but also through participation ..."[47]
  • A video of Holloway-Smith's scuba dive to the SX in the Hauraki Gulf off Takapuna.[48] It showed the cable was around the diameter of a garden hose lying across the seabed.[49]
  • Te Ika-a-Maui restored with replacements for the lost tiles.[40] Originally installed in Northcote, the mural was re-installed in the public library of neighbouring Takapuna in 2019.[50]
  • A video about Whenuapai: the SX landing station and nearby Royal New Zealand Air Force Base Auckland. In 2014, documents leaked by Edward Snowden suggested that the SX had been tapped by the Speargun programme to collect intelligence for the Five Eyes alliance.[51] Holloway-Smith speculated that the tap was in the Whenuapai landing station and the data it extracted was processed on the air base. She laid out circumstantial evidence for her theory in the thesis.[52]
  • Seven marker posts, each one engraved with the details of a communications cable at Muriwai, for a proposed walk that was not completed.[53]

Mark Amery reviewed the collection and highlighted the Whenuapai video. He wrote "This work isn’t subtle, but it adventurously explores an important subject in ways that cleverly physicalise and visualise the unseen."[54]

Holloway-Smith titled her thesis The Southern Cross Cable: A Tour: Art, the Internet and National Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.[55] She received a doctorate in 2019.[56]

E. Mervyn Taylor Mural Search and Recovery Project

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Ernest Mervyn Taylor (1906–1964) was a New Zealand artist particularly known for wood engraving.[57] Between 1956 and his death, Taylor was commissioned to create a number of murals, most for spaces where they could be viewed by the public.[58] In 2014, during research for her doctorate, Holloway-Smith found one of these murals: Te Ika-a-Maui (1962).[59] It was restored by a group that included Taylor's granddaughter.[60] She had compiled a list of Taylor's murals, and shared it with Holloway-Smith who proposed doing further research to CoCA.[61]

In 2015, the E. Mervyn Taylor Mural Search and Recovery Project launched with Holloway-Smith as director supported by Sue Elliott.[62] By 2018, 12 murals had been documented: 11 were originally in public spaces with one in a private boardroom. Five of the public murals were still accessible. However, the rest had suffered fates including being moved to a private space or an unknown location, being walled in or painted over.[63][64] The project concluded with the publication of a book Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor edited by Holloway-Smith.[1] The book was shortlisted in the illustrated non-fiction category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2019.[65]

During the project, members of the public came forward with information about murals by other artists. Holloway-Smith and Elliott added these to an informal register that grew to 160 entries. Buildings of national significance are registered and protected by Heritage New Zealand. However, there was no national register of public artwork,[66] and work had little protection from architects and interior designers.[67]

Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand

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Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand (PAHANZ) "... is a research initiative to find, document and protect [the nation's] 20th century public art heritage.", according to their website.[68] The co-directors are Holloway-Smith and Sue Elliott.[69][70]

They created PAHANZ to develop a national register of 20th century public work with the support of CoCA and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.[71] In the early 2020s, the ministry funded PAHANZ to put the register on the web and establish a forum for those working with public art.[72] The web register launched in July 2023 with 380 works.[69][73] In 2024, Wellington City Council supported the addition of further works.[70]

As of November 2024, the web register lists 421 works. Each one has a current status for the viewing public: accessible, hidden or lost (whereabouts unknown or destroyed).[74]

Bledisloe Bebop (2020)

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In 1959, the seven-storey Bledisloe State Building, now known as Bledisloe House, opened in Auckland city centre.[75][76] For the structure on its roof, New Zealand artist Guy Ngan (1926–2017) created Untitled (1956) a glass mosaic frieze.[77] It was the earliest of over 30 public works by Ngan.[78][79]

To get a close view, Holloway-Smith had the work videoed from aerial drones. She then created Bledisloe Bebop (2020) setting shots of the frieze to a recording of bebop from the same era.[80] Public screenings of the video were held in Aotea Square, adjacent to Bledisloe House, during October 2020.[78]

Personal life

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Holloway-Smith lives with her civil union partner and children in Wellington.[81]

Notes

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  1. ^ a b Holloway-Smith 2018a.
  2. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, p. 4.
  3. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, p. 39.
  4. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, p. 6.
  5. ^ a b McDonald 2009.
  6. ^ Smith 2009.
  7. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, p. 8.
  8. ^ CFF 2009.
  9. ^ RNZ 2009a.
  10. ^ Holloway-Smith 2009.
  11. ^ RNZ 2009b.
  12. ^ Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011, s 122.
  13. ^ Holloway-Smith 2014.
  14. ^ a b c O'Neill 2010.
  15. ^ a b c Dornauf 2012.
  16. ^ NZOSA 2010.
  17. ^ RG 2012.
  18. ^ a b EC 2024.
  19. ^ a b c Dekker 2011.
  20. ^ a b Holloway-Smith 2010.
  21. ^ a b Bartley 2011.
  22. ^ Holloway-Smith 2011.
  23. ^ a b Freeman 2011.
  24. ^ a b Johnson 2011.
  25. ^ Holloway-Smith 2012a.
  26. ^ Holloway-Smith 2012b.
  27. ^ Ballard 2013, p. 2.
  28. ^ Entwisle 2013.
  29. ^ Strachan 2013.
  30. ^ Smallman 2015.
  31. ^ CGW 2012.
  32. ^ a b c Amery 2012.
  33. ^ Freeman 2012.
  34. ^ NZOSA 2012.
  35. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, p. 141.
  36. ^ a b Keall 2018.
  37. ^ Pullar-Strecker 2021.
  38. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, pp. 141–142.
  39. ^ a b Holloway-Smith 2018a, chpt. 6.
  40. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018b, pp. 2–3, 6–7, 12–13, 18–19, 24–25.
  41. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, appx. I.
  42. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, appx. III.
  43. ^ CGW 2018.
  44. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, chpt. Results.
  45. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018b.
  46. ^ Ryan 2018.
  47. ^ McDonald 2018.
  48. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, p. 11.
  49. ^ RO 2019.
  50. ^ Safi 2014.
  51. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, pp. 103–119.
  52. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c, pp. 120–127.
  53. ^ Amery 2018.
  54. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018c.
  55. ^ MU 2019.
  56. ^ Mackle 2015.
  57. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, pp. 59–216.
  58. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, p. 39,120-133.
  59. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, p. 127.
  60. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, p. 34-35,41.
  61. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, pp. 41, 231.
  62. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, pp. 6–29.
  63. ^ PAHANZ 2024f.
  64. ^ Ockham 2019.
  65. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, pp. 218–219.
  66. ^ Mulligan 2023, 10:25 minutes in.
  67. ^ PAHANZ 2024a.
  68. ^ a b Chumko 2023.
  69. ^ a b PAHANZ 2024b.
  70. ^ MU 2022.
  71. ^ MfCaH 2023.
  72. ^ Mulligan 2023.
  73. ^ PAHANZ 2024c.
  74. ^ Orsman 2019.
  75. ^ NLoNZ 2024a.
  76. ^ PAHANZ 2024d.
  77. ^ a b CoCA 2020.
  78. ^ PAHANZ 2024e.
  79. ^ Holloway-Smith 2020.
  80. ^ Holloway-Smith 2018a, p. 247.

References

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