Gwenyth Chao
fruiting flesh
March 2026

Thanks to all who visited fruiting flesh in March, and to all who toasted Gwenyth and her work at the opening celebration on Friday, March 6, and to all who shaped paper sheets and forms, making other lives for corn husks and garlic peels and wilted lettuce and fragrant lemongrass at her skill-sharing workshop on Sunday, March 29, and, of course, thanks to the artist most of all.

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A list of materials can now be downloaded as a PDF.

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Gwenyth Chao, fruiting flesh, 2026. All photos: Rachel Topham Photography

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Gwenyth Chao’s research-creation praxis takes the artist’s studio as multi-part and simultaneous workshop, kitchen, portal, library, and lab. By design impermanent, her sculptures and installations—singular forms or complex composites frequently made of composted pulps or peels that have been stabilized, bound, or hardened into new and often estranged and astonishing forms—cycle, and are recycled, from soil to studio to exhibition and back again.

Gwenyth received an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2023, and previously completed undergraduate studies at the University of Guelph, and her interdisciplinary practice has been developed and shared in contexts of—or pairing—art and science, including as a contributing artist to Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW), a four-year project co-investigated by Ingrid Koenig and Dr. Randy Lee Cutler (2016–2020). In 2024–2025 Gwenyth was an AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow, Foundation, at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, working out of the Foundations Lab, a research and programming centre with a wide-ranging collection of natural and created object samples. On her return to Vancouver in fall 2025, a solo exhibition, /stāj/ 3.0, briefly transplanted Gwenyth’s lab-kitchen-studio—and practice-sharing workshops—to the former library space of Fort Langley Community Hall, organized by Fort Gallery, a mobile artist-run centre organizing site-specific projects across the Fraser Valley.

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Gwenyth's studio practice and her skill-sharing workshop in conjunction with this exhibition was directly supported by a BC Arts Council Individual Arts Grant: Visual Artists—as a self-funded project space paying CARFAC A.1.1.1 Single work/Small sites Category 1 exhibition fees, ECHO-ECHO is grateful that the BC Arts Council offered the artist additional financial support for her time-intensive practice and ambitious installation here.

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