Artist Emma Fitts is invading and re-working the gallery space at High Street Project during October with her bold canvases that traverse the terrain between sculpture and painting.

In The Walls Aren't Moving, Fitts brings the background to the foreground, with the buckles, dips and waves of the canvases creating the content of the works.Artist Emma Fitts is invading and re-working the gallery space at High Street Project during October with her bold canvases that traverse the terrain between sculpture and painting.

In The Walls Aren't Moving, Fitts brings the background to the foreground, with the buckles, dips and waves of the canvases creating the content of the works.Fitts has long been interested in the processes involved in painting and the traditional functions which are given to each component. Paint is for creating depth, image and form, and the canvas is the supporting background. In The Walls Aren't Moving, she rejects the use of painting materials in such a conventional manner and puts paint, canvas and frame all to work in ways which challenge the medium and pose new questions about painting's efficacy.

"Recently, I have been investigating the idea of image and form in painting installations within a gallery setting," Fitts has said of her work, "so that the form and picture are seamlessly intertwined with the entire space. Puckered, pleated and folded images are created within a canvas that is plastered directly into the wall resulting in the whole surrounding wall being activated.

"Canvas is less predictable and malleable than paint and by making images directly from canvas the material is able to speak. Through manipulating the familiar and inverting the painting process, abstract images are created alongside a critique of paint materials and processes."

Fitts' large canvases also take on the function of architecture. Corners are swallowed and the large pillars which dominate the gallery are stretched beyond their usual dimensions. The artist pushes painting in a number of different directions, to function as architecture, decoration, background, foreground and sculpture. As a result, The Wall Aren't Moving is a thorough and thought provoking deconstruction of painting as a medium.

When: 2-20 October 2007
Where: High Street Project, Level 1, 140A Lichfield St, Christchurch

4/10/07