The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe)
Fiona Clark

Preview: Tuesday 21 October 2025, 6pm
Continues until Saturday 15 November 2025

The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe) is presented with support of Michael Lett Gallery.

The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe) series is about trauma. In these works, Clark crosses between her own history of injury and recovery, the inherited traumas of her maternal line, and those of women she grew up alongside. In June 1977 Clark was seriously injured in a motor vehicle accident, undergoing extensive facial surgery, a two-year recovery period and then living with partial sight. Her grandmother Annie Victoria Ribe was likewise scarred after being attacked by her pet kangaroo, taking years before returning to teaching. Clark’s mother carried the trauma of losing two children. Interwoven through these recollections is the darker thread of sexual violation, the unfinished business of wounds that remain unhealed.

Fiona Clark’s fabric works stage these memories through gestures of play, violence, and repair. Dolls appear as mutable figures torn apart, limbs ripped, their bodies stitched into assemblages on hessian sacks once containing sugar or blood-and-bone fertiliser. These hessian sacks, once circulating through the industrial landscape of Taranaki, carried residues of labour and resource extraction. In Clark’s hands, they become vessels of memory and material haunting, linked to familial inheritance as much as to colonial and regional economies. Some were later gifted to Don Driver, whose own works mobilised their rough tactility. Here they remain tethered to Clark’s unsettling reanimations. Created in 1997 and never before exhibited in Aotearoa, these works resurface as revenants, insisting on their continued urgency.

The fabrics themselves carry multiple genealogies. Some were sourced from Waitara community shops, others from Clark’s mother’s dressmaking practice, alongside a personal collection of half-finished garments. These fragments are stitched together with a deliberate refusal of polish, embracing the domestic uncoolness of knitting and sewing. A knitted carrot recalls her mother’s playful gesture of dressing Clark as a vegetable for the Inglewood Primary School fancy dress ball. Elsewhere, knitted pumpkins, hair curlers, and pants speak to the ways memory is carried in textile form. Humour, affection and estrangement are entangled in these works that break from the sentimental framing of domestic craft.

Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim (2017) provides a critical framework for approaching Clark’s dismembered dolls and ruptured textiles. Puar theorises maiming as a political technology. For Puar, maiming is an intentional suspension between life and death, health and disablement, produced by state and colonial violence. Clark’s dolls inhabit this suspended state. Neither restored to wholeness nor annihilated, they linger in a condition of unfinished injury. This speaks to the persistence of damage as a lived reality, one that resists assimilation into narratives of progress or repair. Clark’s assemblages thus visualise maiming as a queer-feminist strategy that insists on the visibility of brokenness, fragmentation, and incompletion.

The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe) rejects closure. Torn seams and ruptured fabrics flicker with ghostly subjectivities, asking us to remain with what resists repair and to see how violence and care are inseparably bound. Clark stitches together her own memory of a body broken rebuilt after a motor accident, her grandmother Annie’s long recovery from a debilitating attack, and her mother’s grief at the loss of children, alongside the unspoken wounds of sexual violation. The works reflect lives marked by structural and intimate violences, the silence of loss, the stigma of disability, the threat of violation. Clark stays with the wound, foregrounding damage as a condition of survival. The Other Half extends beyond autobiography to form a queer-feminist archive where the grotesque, tender, playful and cruel intermingle and insist on bearing witness to the lives history has too often erased.


Taranaki-born Fiona Clark (1954-) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most celebrated art photographers. Since completing her Diploma in Fine Arts (Honours) at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts in 1975, Clark has spent more than five decades photographing the people and places around her. Working in a social documentary style, Clark’s artistic practice engages with the politics of gender, identity and the body, and her long-term projects have focused in on specific social groups including transgender and bodybuilding communities. Clark lives and works in an old ex- dairy factory in Tikorangi, Taranaki. She was made an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate in 2023.