Profile

Penne Thornton is a multidisciplinary creative producer and research fellow working across performance, exhibitions, public programming, artist development and community engagement.
Penne has a research focus on collaborative, place-based practice and is an advocate for social justice and equity in the arts.





Image by Leiko Manalang-Frequin



Email
pennethornton(at)gmail.com


Select Projects

>A People’s Guide to (North) Geelong
>Duwa
>Anything & Everything
>WiCLA


Platform Arts Projects

Performance
 >Death Warmed Up
 >Texture of Absence
>Paradise Lots
>Slip
>The Director
 >Bodies of Water
>Maps of the Heart
>Pictures and Ghosts
Artist Development

>Neighbourhood LAB
 >infinity ensemble
>金山 婆 Gold Mountain Wife
 

Publications

 > Rising Lines
> Collective Mothering
> Collective Mothering Vol 2


Research

> Making Histories:Young People as Visual Historians of Changing Cities (Deakin University and RMIT ARC  Discovery Project)










Rising Lines

Publication

Ed. Ranch Pressing with Amber Smith, Laurie Oxenford, Katey O’Sullivan, Fiona Lee, Colin Maier and Penne Thornton

Saddle stitched, risograph publication printed + bound by Ranch Pressing (AU)

72 pages + colour photograph

Edition 1 of 30 and 2 of 30

ISBN 978-1-7636302-4-6

Rising Lines was supported by the City of Greater Geelong

May/October 2026
Ranch Pressing

In response to the floods in northeast Australia in 2022, artist Katey O’Sullivan made a body of work titled A Line Made by Something Else. Awash in news coverage of the catastrophic weather event, O’Sullivan began an investigation into the aesthetic particulars of the flooding. 

This publication continues O’Sullivan’s inquiry through the commissioning of five new text works by artists Fiona Lee, Penne Thornton, Laurie Oxenford, Amber Smith and O’Sullivan. The commissioned works explore connection and inundation; physical, psychological, inherited, longed for and feared. They appear here, fragmented and rethreaded, converging on one another, the way that fears, lives, losses and stories do.  

After the flood, there is fear, both above and below the line. The tide continues to rise with the temperature, and we are softly paralysed imagining our own extinction. We do very little. This book marks the current tide line as we mourn ourselves as future ghosts adrift in the present.

Images by Colin Maier

Collective Mothering

Publication

Ed. Amber Smith with Amelia Wallin, Sarah Jones, Briony Galligan + Abbra Kotlarczyk, Emma Michaelis, Hayley Millar Baker, Lillian O’Neil, Pauline Rotsaert and
Penne Thornton

Saddle stitched, risograph publication printed + bound by Ranch Pressing (AU) with original hand drawn covers by Otto Opus Don-Smith.

53 pages
Edition of 40
ISBN 978-1-7636302-2-2
October 2025

Supported by Platform Arts
2025 Ranch Pressing

In a time marked by ecological crisis, climate change, global conflict, and the instability of late-stage capitalism, matrilineal and maternal models of care offer vital, alternative ways of imagining continuity, resilience, and collective well-being. They provide a blueprint for rethinking relationships—not only between people, but also with the environment and future generations. They also propose systems and ways of being that sit outside of capitalist, consumerist, and Western models of thinking. Collective Mothering discusses these ideas, proposing potential models for connecting communities by creating sites for dialogue, companionship, sharing, and ultimately collective care...

Images by Colin Maier

Collective Mothering Vol 2

Publication

Amber Smith (Ed.) with Sarah Jones + Kate Baker, Anie Mullen-Walsh, Emily Bowman, Penne Thornton, Jo Langdon, Samantha Taylor, Elvis Richardson, Jasmine Mansbridge + Eden Ariston, Amy Thunig-McGregor, Nikki McKenzie.

Saddle stitched, risograph publication printed + bound by Ranch Pressing (AU) with original hand drawn covers by Magnolia + Otto Don-Smith.

53 pages, poster + postcard lift out
21 x 14cms
Edition of 40
ISBN 978-1-7636302-5-3
August 2026Ranch Pressing


......Artists remind us that the maternal is not only domestic — it is political, aesthetic, embodied, and insurgent. As Audre Lorde writes, ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ [6] This kind of care work, especially for those who mother in isolation or at the margins, is an act of resistance. To mother is to be in a state of becoming — constantly. This collection embraces that flux.

                            - Amber Smith, 2025


Images by Colin Maier




 I acknowledge the life systems of land, river, sea and atmosphere and the Waddawurrung people’s as the First People’s on whose sacred Country I live. This land was never ceded. I give respect to all First Nations people’s, their elders and rising generations