Presented with Ava Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair, Emma’s installation begins with a familiar art-historical problem: what remains of an artwork once its image circulates freely?

Recalling Walter Benjamin’s writing on the “aura” of the image, the work probes the displacement of value from object to encounter — from sustained looking to the social capital of having witnessed. The museum gift shop souvenir, the endlessly reproduced masterpiece, the documented exhibition image: these become conditions rather than afterthoughts.

At its centre is a reconfiguration of Primavera (c.1482) by Sandro Botticelli — among the most reproduced paintings in Western art history — set in tension with a comparatively obscure 18th-century court scene. The juxtaposition destabilises hierarchies of visibility and asks how certain images achieve canonical permanence while others remain peripheral.

The jester, historically licensed to deliver unwelcome truths under the guise of comedy, emerges as a latent protagonist. As a figure suspended between critique and complicity, entertainment and information, the jester mirrors the artwork’s own position within systems of display and evaluation.

Materially, the entire installation is knitted across three gauges, produced using both industrial and domestic knitting machines. The medium is not incidental. Knitting — repetitive, accumulative, structurally interdependent — becomes an analogue for circulation itself. Threads loop and interlock as images do, each dependent on systems larger than itself. A surrounding line drawing, the artist’s schematic of an institution, frames the work while simultaneously diagramming its conditions of existence.

Rather than offering a singular image to be consumed, the installation foregrounds its own mediation. It is less concerned with originality than with afterlife: how artworks persist, mutate and accrue meaning long after the gallery lights dim.