Emily Hartley-Skudder, Petite Spa, Aotearoa Art Fair 2025
Emily Hartley-Skudder (born 1988, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland) is a contemporary artist living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.
Working across painting, installation, and assemblage, she is known for her immersive environments and still life compositions that explore the ‘artificial ordinary’—spaces and objects that combine domestic familiarity with hyper-feminine excess.
Hartley-Skudder’s process begins with the somewhat obsessive collecting of found objects and materials: her search for miniatures, toys, and plastic receptacles has expanded into bathroom ceramics and snake-oil hygiene tools. These items are carefully arranged, photographed and translated into meticulous oil paintings. Drawing from the visual language of product photography and still life traditions, her work attempts to subvert a male-dominated art history with playful feminism. Amy Weng notes, “If still lifes are often about the transience of life and pleasure, Hartley-Skudder’s are a vision of plastic immortality, where the female body is trapped within the machine of resplendent consumption.”
Hartley-Skudder manipulates the commonplace, transforming the familiar into something uncanny, sickly sweet and quietly political. Her use of retro and distinctly dated homewares speaks to gendered expectations, taste, and class, revealing the ways in which the domestic space has long been one of the few culturally appropriate sites of female creativity. Her scenes are at once nostalgic and disconcerting—offering both critique and delight.
For the Aotearoa Art Fair 2025, Jhana Millers Gallery brings us Petite Spa, a solo presentation by Hartley-Skudder. The booth will become a dreamlike bathroom showroom: a rogue bidet, avocado shub, and pink-and-purple lino meet a suite of exquisite oil paintings. Hartley-Skudder’s chosen subjects have shrunk back down to a diminutive scale, captured mid-splash with high-speed flash photography and then made into paintings. Bathtubs fly, pool inflatables hover, and sinks fill from the sky. These works riff on staged sets and advertising tropes, creating a surreal theatre of cleanliness, control, and excess. Named after a brand of single-use motel toiletries, Petite Spa invites us to reimagine our relationship with the domestic space, everyday ritual, and the commodification of care. Step inside—your bathroom will never look the same.
