Bronwyn Holloway-Smith

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith
Born	Bronwyn Smith 1982 (age 41–42)[1] Lower Hutt[citation needed]
Nationality	New Zealand
Alma mater	Massey University
Website	hollowaysmith.nz

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.

Holloway-Smith graduated from Massey University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) in 2006.^{[citation needed]} In 2014, she was awarded a scholarship to study for a PhD in Fine Art.^[2] Holloway-Smith completed her PhD at the university's Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts (CoCA) in 2018.^[3][4]

She describes herself as interested in "internet culture, 3-dimensional printing, open source art, and space colonisation."^[5] She edited the book WANTED: The search for the modernist murals of E. Mervyn Taylor, published in 2018.^[6][1]

The foundation sought to "... encourage, and promote New Zealand artists' views on issues that have the potential to influence their collective creativity." through advocacy and education.^[2] It was launched, in December 2008, to oppose section 92 of the Copyright Act, due to come into force at the end of February 2009.^[7] Holloway-Smith was a co-founder of Creative Freedom Foundation (CFF),^[5] and served as their director and spokesperson.^[2]

The Copyright Act 1994, s 92A read "Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers".^[8] CFF believed it would force Internet service providers to disconnect customers who had been accused, but not convicted, of illegally downloading copyrighted content. It was dubbed the guilt upon accusation law, and the foundation wanted it repealed.^[7]

CFF called for the first New Zealand Internet Blackout to run 16–23 February 2009,^[9] and organised online and paper petitions. On 19 February, Holloway-Smith led around 200 protestors at parliament.^[10] She handed the petitions to Peter Dunne MP with over 10,000 virtual and 149 written signatures.^[11][12] Radio New Zealand interviewed Holloway-Smith at the protest,^[13] the first of many appearances over the next ten years.^[14]

Section 92A never came into force and was repealed by the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011.^[8] CFF advocated for creative freedom on that act, other domestic law and international treaties. In July 2014, Holloway-Smith stepped down from CFF to start her PhD. Lacking a successor, the trustees put the foundation into hiatus.^[2]

Massey 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 belong to the National Museum of New Zealand which moved out to become Te Papa.^[15][16] Holloway-Smith imagined museum pieces that might have been lost in the move.^[15]

Ghosts in the Form of Gifts (2009) was a collection of ten replacement pieces produced with an open design RepRap 3D printer.^[15] Three of the originals were from nature: a cicada in flight, a sperm whale tooth,^[16] and a giant snail shell. The rest were man made and, with one exception, generic and of unknown origin.^[15] They included a Māori matua (English: fish hook) and poi, a tapa cloth beater and an adze.^[15] The exception was the Utah teapot a 3D model whose origin was well known. 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, the collection was shown at RAMP Gallery in Hamilton,^[16] and reviewed by artist Peter Dornauf.^[18] He wrote that everyday 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."^[16] The work also raised questions. Holloway-Smith asked "Is something a sculpture if you print it out from a machine?"^[15] And Dornauf linked open sourcing the instructions to the issue of authorship.^[16]

In 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.^[19] 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".^[19]

A website was also produced.^[20]

In 2012, the City Gallery Wellington ran The Obstinate Object: Contemporary New Zealand Sculpture exhibition 24 February–10 June.^[21] Running alongside the exhibition was Whisper Down the Lane (2012) through which Holloway-Smith continued to raise awareness of copyright and produce art with 3D technologies.

Holloway-Smith picked one sculpture a week from the exhibition.^[22] 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.^[23] The miniatures were shown in the gallery's reading room and sold online.^[22] Again, the 3D printer instructions were gifted under a Creative Commons license, this time Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA).^[23]

Whisper Down the Lane was reviewed by art critic Mark Amery.^[18] 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."^[22] It also won the Open Source in the Arts category at the New Zealand Open Source Awards 2012.^[24]

Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand (PAHANZ) "... is a research initiative to find, document and protect [the nations's] 20th century public art heritage.", according to their website.^[25] At CoCA, Holloway-Smith and Sue Elliott's research into the murals of E. Mervyn Taylor developed into an informal register of public art.^[26][27] By the late 2010s, PAHANZ planned to make the register accessible through their website.^[28] 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.^[29][30] The national register of 20th century public art was launched on the PAHANZ website in July 2023.^[26] In 2024, Wellington City Council supported the addition of further works in their region.^[31]

As of November 2024,^[update] the register on the web lists 421 works. Each one 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.^[32]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bronwyn Holloway-Smith.

• Official website
  • Ghosts in the Form of Gifts (2009)
  • Pioneer City (2011)
  • Whisper Down the Lane (2012)
• City Gallery exhibition explores Kiwi identity and Bronwyn Holloway-Smith's inquiry into digital NZ, Stuff, 5 March 2018
• Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand