OPENING EVENT: Wednesday, 10 June, 5.30-7.30pm

Emma Fitts’ upcoming solo exhibition with Melanie Roger Gallery revisits and reconfigures a body of work first presented in the courtyard at Objectspace in Lapping at your door (2022), and later reconfigured for presentation at The Physics Room in The Air like a stone (2023) – a two person exhibition curated by Abby Cunnane and presented with a feature-length 16mm film by Rosalind Nashashibi, Denim Sky (2018-2022),. Rather than introducing an entirely new body of work, the exhibition traces an ongoing process of adjustment and translation, where materials, forms, and decisions are continually tested against changing conditions of site and display.

In its original outdoor context, the work was subject to exposure—sunlight shifting across surfaces, rain marking and softening edges, wind subtly displacing or stressing elements over time. These were not incidental effects but active participants in the work’s formation. Weathering altered surfaces and tones, leaving behind traces that now function as a kind of record: a quiet index of duration, contingency, and responsiveness to site.

At The Physics Room, this materially altered work was reconfigured within an interior space, prompting a first recalibration of scale, spacing, and relational tension. That iteration introduced a different kind of attention—less contingent on environmental fluctuation, more attuned to the interplay between objects, architecture, and viewer movement.

Presented now at Melanie Roger Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau, the exhibition also marks a return of the work to the place that actively helped shape it. The city’s conditions—its light, climate, and spatial character—remain embedded within the materials, even as they are encountered anew. These works carry the cumulative effects of their prior contexts. Fitts does not restore or erase the marks of exposure; instead, she allows them to remain visible, folding the courtyard’s conditions into the exhibition as a residual presence, alongside the spatial refinements developed through its subsequent reinstallation. Materials appear both shaped and unsettled by their prior lives, holding a tension between what was exposed and what is now contained.

The shift into this gallery context further recalibrates how the work is encountered. Distances tighten and expand in measured ways, relationships between elements are sharpened, and the viewer’s movement is guided with a heightened sense of deliberation. Negative space, intervals, and points of contact take on increased significance, drawing attention to how the work occupies and activates the room.

This exhibition is not a restaging but an accumulation. It asks how works persist through change, how they gather meaning across successive iterations, and how external forces—time, weather, exposure, and reinstallation—become embedded within form. What emerges is a nuanced negotiation between contexts: an installation that holds within it the memory of openness while continuing to evolve through each new configuration, now returned to the site that first impressed itself upon it.

This solo presentation coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the McMahon House Artist Residency Programme  and Fitts’ 2018 residency there, offering a timely extension of her ongoing engagement with site, duration, and the conditions that shape material practice.  A small selection of photographic works made during Fitts time there will also be shown in the exhibitiion.