F.B.P.D / Emma Wallbanks
Lyttelton, Aotearoa

Emma Wallbanks is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves across video, installation, and garment-making. Working from Lyttelton, her work engages the unstable territory between analogue and digital, language and image, structure and disruption.

In her moving-image works, fragments accumulate—layered, compressed, and reconfigured into looping environments that resist clear resolution. Drawing on semiotics and visual language, Wallbanks unsettles familiar systems of meaning, allowing emotion, memory, and distortion to surface in their place. Images are felt as much as read—slipping between recognition and abstraction.

Materiality remains central. Hand-sewn silks, welded frames, and constructed projection surfaces bring a physical presence to her installations, where scale and architecture shape the experience. The edge—where image meets surface, where meaning begins to fracture—is a recurring point of focus.

Alongside this, her clothing label Fascinating But Potentially Dangerous (F.B.P.D) extends these concerns into wearable form. Each garment is a one-off, constructed through repurposed materials and unconventional pattern cutting. Pieces can shift—reversed, reoriented, worn in multiple ways—carrying a sense of instability, adaptability, and play.

Across both practices, Wallbanks works at the threshold—where systems break down, reform, and remain in flux.