Emma Fitts has increasingly focused her attention on developing her textile practice since taking out the Premier Award for ZAFAA18 in March last year.  The judges described Fitts’ winning work in the following way:

We all had felt its ability to push and pull the viewer into different directions, sitting in a space between the intimate, domestic and wider colonial experience located within the Pacific. We agreed that the chosen artist’s engagement with architecture, biographies and alternative histories in a broader social context contributed to our desire to see a larger group of works driven by these ideas as a solo show.

Emma Fitts completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 2002 and a Master of Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art in 2010.  Her individual practice and her collaborative work as Fitts & Holderness and Victor & Hester has seen her participate in exhibitions and residences both nationally and internationally.  Fitts’ accolades include being the 2014 Olivia Spencer Bower awardee, the 2018 McCahon House Artist in Residence and recently being award the Fulbright-Wallace Arts Trust Award, which will see her undertake a ten-week residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Fitts’s exhibition Towards Another Figure is an exhibition which draws on her research into alternative histories, storytelling, and events.  This most recent body of work has been informed by the histories of women who were overlooked or under-represented in the traditional archive. The idea of biography; the histories of architecture and textiles; and a broader social context are integral elements of her work.

Image Credit: Emma Fitts, Unknown Figure 1-6 (detail), silk and wool, 2019, image courtesy of the artist