Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

Stewart was born in Montréal, Québec. She received a BFA from York University, Toronto and an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Stewart is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Council’s and has been on numerous juries for peer review. In 2010 Stewart was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts (RCA).

Stewart has an extensive exhibition record, and her work has been the subject of exhibitions at notable institutions including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York, US; Koffler Gallery, Ontario; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; Medalta Museum, Alberta; Musée Barthète, France and ACT Design Museum, Australia.

In 2013 Stewart was awarded a 3 month residency to create a beeswax room/sensory architecture at Lotusland, Montecito, California and was a feature artist in the exhibition Swarm at the botanical garden estate. In 2016 Stewart received a commission from Maison Alexandre in Paris, France to create a beeswax frieze and was shortlisted for a CAMH Public Art commission. During 2017 Stewart was in residence at Linda Duvall’s/PAVED Gallery, Saskatoon, In The Hole residency followed by a houselife, a residency/exhibition in collaboration with visual artist Laura Vickerson, in Medicine Hat, Alberta at the Medalta Museum. In 2018-19 Stewart was awarded for the second time, the Nick Novak Fellowship at Open Studio, Toronto which allowed her a full year of intensive research and the creation of a new body of work focused on cyanotype and artist books. This work was showcased at a solo exhibition ‘Botanique’ at Open Studio in the winter of 2019.

In the spring of the same year Stewart returned to France to create a second architectural installation, ‘a primitive hut’ constructed from foraged detritus, in the garden estate of Musée Barthète.  While in residence Stewart divided her time between building, wandering, and foraging in the vast gardens of the estate and exploring deep into the workrooms of the museum. Accompanying this architectural project Stewart created an artist book using both digital and pinhole photography featuring her explorations in the backroom archives of the museum. Each experience became a fold in thinking about archives, gardens, and collections as haptic spaces.

In 2021, along with Dianne Bos, Mary Anne Barkhouse, and Sarah Fuller, Stewart was part of The Power Plant’s, Toronto, Field Trip Project. This project explored their shared interest in the natural world and historic techniques of photography and was a precursor to the exhibition Redesigning Paradise shown at the Whyte Museum, Banff, Alberta in the winter of 2023.

An integral part of Stewart’s practice has been the coordination/curation of projects in collaboration with artists and writers. These have taken the shape of international residencies, publications, exhibitions, and off-site interventions in historic sites.

Her most recent collaboration is the co-founding with artist Jenn Law of Arts + Letters Press, (2017) an experimental publishing platform that seeks to understand “reading as a material practice”. To date, the central focus of this experimental platform has been the creation of a journal, art+reading, with each issue inviting artists, writers and creative individuals to respond to themes such as ‘Rupture’, ‘Entanglement’, and ‘Evolve’. During the pandemic Stewart and Law under this umbrella commissioned 21 artist projects published on Instagram which became the source material for Issue 3. Currently they are working on ideas of ‘poetic ecologies’ for Issue 4 which will be launched sometime in 2026.

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