Upstairs Exhibition - Emma Beth

The Upstairs Art Gallery

Open daily, 10am to 4pm

Entry is free

Closed New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and ANZAC Day

Upstairs Gallery is located on Level 1 of Lopdell House

EMMA BETH: BECOMING MARSH

On show 7 March to 23 March

You are warmly invited to the opening of the solo exhibition Becoming Marsh by Emma Beth. Opening Friday 7 March, 6pm to 7.30pm.

Becoming Marsh explores the fluid, permeable nature of bodies, drawing on post-humanist thought to reveal our entanglements with the watery world.

These painted figures extend beyond their “sacs of skin” (Neimanis), rejecting containment and fixed boundaries. Their forms, often suggested only through outlines, morph into swampy backgrounds, dissolving distinctions between subject and environment and evoking an affective world.

The watery materiality of paint serves as a feminist inquiry, challenging expectations that women remain clean, controlled, and separate from the porous realities of embodiment. Colour bleeds across the surface, embracing the unruly, the interconnected, and the ever-becoming state of existence. By rejecting anatomical definition, the figures transform into something animalistic: feral, imperfect, and deeply human.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Email gallery@upstairs.org.nz with any enquiries or call 09 817 4278

Solo Exhibition