EMMA WALLBANKS

Wallbanks’ practice takes cues from philosophy and the study of semiotics and visual linguistics. With a rebellious sensibility, the work often encourages chaos, cropped and jutted information depict skewed emotions, thwarted translations of traditional media and vernacular histories. Through her video installations Wallbanks challenges the code of traditional systems, she does this through compressing and layering both outsourced and original imagery (moving and still) into a web or loop of trashed video content. Her work offers the audience an emotive deep dive into the digital shift, where analogue media is uncomfortably mated with digital content, asking the viewer to contemplate the semilogical shift brought about through the tender years of the millennials. Her works are grounded in something known, something remembered and relatable, yet they are abstracted from anything concrete. Correlated with themes traditionally associated with sculpture and painting her installations engages an audience through movement and memory, members are activated in space as they try to make links within the imagery that is elusive and slippery at best.

Multi-screen projections are preferred, and support structures are considered carefully. Wallbanks builds her own projection screens with hand sewn silks and welded frames, due to this her visuals encourage close inspection of the handcrafts involved in their construction. She engages size and scale through her work, as screen sizes are often in response to the various architectural elements of the exhibition space. The ‘surface’ of the image both within the video content and of the supports that hold them, tend to take precedent over the narrative content, asking us to consider the ‘edge’, and to explore the digital shift as a dramatic thrusting and colliding of signs.

Alongside her exhibiting work, Emma Wallbanks founded her own independent clothing label in 2019. Branded ‘Fascinating but Potentially Dangerous’. Akin the her visual practice Wallbanks’ label focuses on the ‘edge’ as a thematic starting point. Clothing pieces are all one offs and treated much like her earlier sculptural works and video installations, insofar as their repurposed nature and rebellious sensibility. Transferring skills developed through her work as a sculpture undergraduate, her garments are all constructed through unconventional pattern cutting means, and most of the garments can be worn inside out and back to front. Handsewn elements are met with hand dyed aspects that are reminiscent of abstract painting. F.B.P.D is represented by The Service Depot in Pōneke.

Courtesy Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch.