About
Emma Velde-Schaffer
Emma Velde-Schaffer is an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based painter whose work explores the relationship between abstraction, figuration, and lived experience. Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury and a Master of Design from the University of Technology Sydney, her practice is grounded in painting as both material inquiry and communication.
Shaped by maternal and feminist experience, recent works draw from everyday domestic moments, often involving her children, and the rhythms of care; being together, letting go, and everything in between. She is interested in moments where tenderness and disorientation sit alongside the familiar, and where the boundaries between self and others become less fixed.
For Velde-Schaffer, painting is a way of sharing how things feel in the body—a world sensed before it becomes language. Through painting and drawing, she explores perception as it shifts, staying close to the emotional and physical experience of everyday life.
Working between figuration and abstraction, forms emerge and dissolve, inhabiting a space of ambiguity and slippage. Light, colour, gesture, and surface negotiate the tension between what is seen and what is felt. Built through layers of making, undoing, and return, her paintings allow revision and accident to remain visible, embracing the unpredictability of paint itself.
Earlier works centred on circular forms as symbolic and rhythmic anchors, while recent paintings use the domestic environment as both subject and point of departure, inviting viewers into a shared space of reflection, connection, and embodied experience.
In Velde’s work, affinities can be detected with the poetic colour fields of Gretchen Albrecht, and the elaborately textured surfaces of Louise Fong. Here is a “decorative” sense that is capable of a rich, subtle formality. There also appears to be similarities to Robert Matta’s techniques – encouraging a certain amount of accident in the first few layers, with opaque paint deployed in simple chromatic chords. This results in a range of abstract surface types which seem to evoke haloes of light, undersea environments and coral reefs, galactic nebulae, mineral-rich volcanic pools, but most importantly a kind of meditative emotional inscape.
Exhibitions & Awards
September - October 2026 - MARK ROTHKO 2026 International Painting Symposium, Daugavpils, Latvia
2025 - Present Representation at Parnell Gallery Auckland
July 2025 - July 2026 Exposure at ART.Co Christchurch (works on paper)
April 2025 - Present Exposure at The Artist’s Room Dunedin (works on paper)
May 2025 Yield, Little River Gallery, Banks Peninsula, with J Wright
April 2025 Guest Judge, Artstart, The Crossing Christchurch
October 2024 Finalist ILT MURIHIKU ART AWARDS 2024 Presented by Invercargill Public Art Gallery and the Southland Art Society
October 2024 Eastside Spring Show, Linwood Arts Eastside Gallery, group show
September 2024 Tenderly Yesterday, Stoddart Cottage Gallery, Christchurch, Solo Show
June 2024 To the Sea and Back, ArtHole Christchurch, Solo Show
May 2024 Open Themed Show, New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, group show
March 2024 Finalist, NZ Painting and Printmaking Award. Waikato Society of Arts
From 2023 Continued exposure at Little River Gallery
August 2023 Eastside Spring Show, Linwood Arts Eastside Gallery, one of four artists
March 2023 Brilliant Vibrant Women, Linwood Arts Eastside Gallery, group show
August 2022 Spring Show, New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, group show
August 2019 SCAPE Women in Art Fundraising Exhibition, Christchurch, group fundraiser
August 2018 SCAPE Women in Art Fundraising Exhibition, Christchurch, group fundraiser
May 2006 Two by Seven, Dobson Bashford Gallery, group show
September 2005 Christchurch Art Gallery Annual Art Event Fundraiser, group fundraiser
March 2005 WATERtight, Dobson Bashford Gallery, Christchurch, Solo Show
May 2004 Full CIRCLE, Article Design Gallery, Christchurch Solo Show
February 2004 Shore Dwellers, Article Design Gallery, Christchurch, group show
November 2002 Leave to Return, Dobson Bashford Gallery, Christchurch, Solo Show
May 2002 Eclipses, the Vault Design Gallery, Christchurch, group show
May 1999 Blinker, the High Street Project, Christchurch, video installation of ‘Sight-seeing’ thesis project
October 1997 Glimpse, the High Street Project, Christchurch, with D McCormick
October 1996 Poke, the High Street Project, Christchurch, with M Mahailovich