Lapping at Your Door is a sculptural commission by Emma Fitts, which was shown at Objectspace in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Emma is represented in Aotearoa by Melanie Roger Gallery and presented new works with the gallery in a group presentation at the Aotearoa Art Fair.
Images:
Muse with Lace in the Laundry, 2018.
Composition in Green, 2019.
Jacket Cut Out 9, 2019.
In the outdoor installation, Lapping at Your Door, a series of dyed and layered canvas panels attached to a tubular steel structure form a new architecture for Objectspace’s courtyard plinth.
Emma’s soft architecture folds together various research threads: modernist design, the body in relation to built environments and the construction of clothing, and how queer physicality can be expressed through the collapsing of architectural space.
Between 1926 — 1929 Eileen Gray designed and constructed E-1027 on the coastline of the Côte d’Azur in the south of France. The front façade of this iconic piece of modernist architecture is spanned by a canvas canopy, its textile softness creating a porous threshold where delineation between spaces is softened. Gray’s canopies serve as an example of the architectural and design developments made by women who both practiced within and subverted historical cannons. For Fitts’, these designs embody the desires of their creators and occupants. They are a backdrop for socialising and conversation in open space — often in radical ways, and in queer company.
Referencing these histories and the architecture of her own home, Fitts’ has constructed an outdoor installation for Objectspace, incorporating her signature fabric banners, imagining how bodies of space that resist clear demarcation provide alternative ways of seeing and making.
For more info on Emma Fitts practice, and contact details for Melanie Roger Gallery, click here.
Emma Fitts, Lapping at Your Door, installed at Objectspace. Image courtesy of the artist and Objectspace.