Gwen van Embden was born in Pretoria. She is a Cape Town-based artist. In 1990 she graduated from UNISA with a BA (Philosophy). In 1999 she completed a Master of Fine Art (Distinction) at the Michaelis Art School at the University of Cape Town. Her master’s work, entitled Hand Work for Keeping the Home, explored identity and memory and how meaning is constructed in the domestic space using a family archive of objects and ephemera.

Van Embden’s proclivity for installation evidenced in her master’s thesis exhibition evolved into a practice focused on curation and investigating archives, utilising institutional collections and reconfiguring them to generate new outcomes and meanings. This led to a series of exhibitions which include; Walking The Book (a National Library of South Africa project, 2001), Curiosity CLXXV (the Michaelis 175th Anniversary exhibition, UCT, 2004) and more recently, Bits, Bites and Tweets (commissioned for UCT Summer School’s 60th anniversary, 2009)

Van Embden participated in Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky’s workshop group—both locally and in Italy— which resulted in her new works produced during this time being included in their group exhibitions. These workshops have been formative in shaping her outlook, particularly in exploring notions of the spiritual and the quotidian in contemporary art practice.

More recently Van Embden has immersed herself in painting with ink, drawing from Eastern sensibilities and traditions. In Mountain & Water (2017) she reflected the manner in which the Chinese language describes ‘landscape’  - as only  understood by the words mountain-water. This has manifested in a distillation of landscape painting, which allows for “the materiality to settle and the spirit of the landscape to arise.”