Emma Fitts
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1979
Blouse and Trousers for Olivia Spencer Bower
- 2014
- Silk
- On loan from the Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation Award Collection
- 7700 x 900mm
- L02/2016
Location: Monica Richards Gallery
Tags: abstraction, clothing
Emma Fitts here pays tribute to a significant local artist of an earlier generation. Blouse and Trousers for Olivia Spencer Bower is based on the cut pieces from garment patterns and belongs to a series of abstract cloth collages exploring women whose stories are often simplified or overlooked. Alongside this work and as part of Victor & Hester, a collaborative project with Amelia Bywater, Fitts also created an online research platform whatwasishappening.tumblr.com, presenting research into the histories and contexts of three female figures: Marlow Moss (UK), Rowena Cade (UK) and Marilyn Waring (Aotearoa), “exploring processes of re-performing and re-documenting to potentially set the histories of these women”. Victor & Hester use interviews, images, documents and links that connect out to a broader field of research to reconsider and amplify, highlighting the interpersonal and fragmentary aspects of research materials. Unfortunately, online platforms are by their nature inherently unstable, with Tumblr losing popularity and the demands of ongoing payments to sustain a presence meaning accessibility of this research is also temporary.
(Living Archives, 25 October 2025 – 8 March 2026)
Exhibition History
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022 – 21 July 2024
Resembling garments in preparation, lifted from the tailor’s cutting-room table and now fixed in perpetuity, Emma Fitts here pays tribute to a significant local artist of an earlier generation. Blouse and Trousers for Olivia Spencer Bower belongs to a series of abstract cloth collages that memorialise women whose lives and work Emma has admired, and speaks to memory as well as ongoing impact. The connection is particularly strong in this work: an Ilam School of Fine Arts and Glasgow School of Art graduate, she returned to Aotearoa New Zealand to take up the Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation Award in 2014.
A homage to the Canterbury artist Olivia Spencer Bower, this silk banner is also a proposed outfit for the artist. It was included in Fitts’ 2015 exhibition ‘Fit-out for Olivia Spencer Bower’ in which she transposed the layout of the artist’s home into the Ilam School of Fine Arts Gallery, presenting a series of fabric banners hung from the existing architecture of the gallery. The show marked the culmination of Fitts’ time as the Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation’s artist-in-residence, and ‘touch[ed] upon questions about contemporary New Zealand art’s inability to consider the wider picture of its culture, art history and lineage’. Fitts has also made similar works referencing other artists and significant figures, which have included bomber jackets for the New Zealand politician and feminist activist Marilyn Waring and Marjorie Jewel (Marlow) Moss, a British Constructivist artist.
Born in Ashburton, Emma Fitts completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at the University of Canterbury in 2002 and a Master of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2010. Based in the UK since 2009, Fitts returned to Christchurch as the Olivia Spencer Bower awardee for 2014. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies nationally and internationally, both as an individual and as part of the collaborations Fitts & Holderness and Victor & Hester.