Profile

Penne Thornton is a multidisciplinary creative producer 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

> Collective Mothering
> Local Word

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The Director

Performance

Creators – Lara Thoms, with Scott Turnbull, Aaron Orzech and Lz Dunn
Performers – Lara Thoms, Scott Turnbull
Designer – Katie Sfetkidis
Sound – Kenneth Pennington


Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton

The Director is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; the City of Melbourne through Arts House and through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts
.
Images by Genevieve Walshe
2023APHIDS

The Director is a bold performance starring charismatic ex-funeral director of 21 years, Scott Turnbull, and artist Lara Thoms. 

Taking up a universal experience and taboo topic, Turnbull and Thoms demystify, expose and expand elements of the death industry, using humour and first-hand knowledge to dig a little deeper on what happens after we go. Nothing is off limits, including the smell of a crematorium, the tools of the mortuary, and driving tractors into a funeral chapel. At a time when dying costs an average of $10,000 and funerals happen within a week, death can seem like a very expensive drive-thru meal.

 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