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)

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Texture of Absence

Performance

Devised and performed by Carmen Yih in collaboration with Jiawen (Wendy) Feng

Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton


Images by Cobie Orger
2025 Carmen Yih and Jiawen Feng

When someone or something exits a space, the space does not return to what it once was, but rather a negative state—defined by the absence of something that was once there.

In Texture of Absence, two dancers explore the physical manifestation of absence to examine how humans experience loss. Drawing from their relationships with identity, memory, and people, Yih and Feng retrace the multi-layered and multi-generational impacts of loss, uncovering the confusion, turmoil, and unexpected beauty that arrive in its wake.

 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