Emma Fitts is a Ōtautahi-based Interdisciplinary artist working amongst sculpture, photography, and textile installation. Drawing from an expanded painting practice in which the canvas is reimagined as an active material in itself, creating its own imagery and form while also behaving as its own support structure. Resulting in these immersive material rich spaces that contemplate architecture, textiles, queer history, feminism and memory. 

In her current exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery, Emerald Pools Fitts explores the notions of memory through the revisitation of a work first exhibited in the courtyard at Objectspace (2022) as lapping at your door, and later reconfigured for the installation of The Air like a stone presented at The Physics Room (2023). The work then undertook another reconfiguration and is now back here in Tāmak at Melanie Roger Gallery, presented as Emerald Pools. 

Through each of its reconfigurations the work has built up this rich history, holding residue of its past lives and allowing the works memories of reconfiguration, weather exposure, and re-installation to become embedded within the work itself.

Alongside the memory of the work's various iterations the work also holds the history of its own making process at its forefront. With Fitts purposefully exposing the works methods of construction through raw seams, and canvas folds. Shifting the viewers attention to not only the work itself but also the wider histories a work might hold.

The show becomes a site of multiplicity, holding the work's accumulative history of its prior contexts, configurations, and surrounding dialogues.

Maya caught up with Emma about the show and her overall practice.