Beyond the Button: How PARKER Contemporary is Reframing Print at Aotearoa Art Fair 2026
Image credit: Portrait of Emily Parker. Photo by Robyn Wood
For many audiences, the word “print” still carries assumptions. It suggests speed, replication, perhaps the press of a button and an identical result each time. Emily Parker, founder of Brisbane’s PARKER Contemporary, knows that perception well and is committed to dismantling it.
“You say the word print, and people think you've clicked a button,” she says. “But there's material, there's chemicals, there's paper, there's time, there's light.”
That distinction sits at the heart of PARKER Contemporary’s return to Aotearoa Art Fair in 2026. Back for a second year in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland and now four fairs in the gallery’s young history, Parker is using the platform to expand how audiences understand contemporary printmaking and works on paper.
The gallery’s program focuses on artists working across printmaking, papermaking and artist books, practices that are often misunderstood despite their long histories and contemporary relevance. For Parker, the challenge is not only presenting the finished object, but helping audiences see the labour, experimentation and intelligence embedded within it.
Image credit: Melissa J Harvey, Transversing the crease, 2026, Pulp prints made from recycled cotton t-shirts and aqueous pigments, 41 × 29 × 3 cm : Melissa J Harvey, Valley Fold, 2026, Pulp prints made from recycled cotton t-shirts and aqueous pigments, 41 × 29 × 3 cm
“Every edition is an original artwork,” she explains. “Artists have to go through materials, paper, labour, time in order to create that work. And there's always going to be the evidence of humans.”
In an era shaped by frictionless image production, Parker is championing mediums where touch still matters. Ink is rolled by hand. Pressure leaves marks. Surfaces vary from one impression to the next. Difference is not a flaw but part of the work’s vitality.
At this year’s fair, Parker has refined her approach. Rather than presenting a larger stable, she has consolidated the booth to five artists, creating space for each practice to be more fully seen. The presentation brings together established and emerging voices, including Dr Tim Mosely, Head of Printmaking at Queensland College of Art and Design, whose work is held in collections including Yale and the Bodleian Library, alongside recent graduate Alethea Richter, who is exhibiting in New Zealand for the first time.
For Parker, that pairing is intentional.
“I think that's what's exciting about the world of art,” she says. “It doesn't have to only be highly established artists that showcase; it's about the ecosystem.”
Image credit: Tim Mosely, big bend, 2025, Five colour hand cut reductive linocut relief print on hand made Awagami Kozo 49.5 × 65 cm. Editions 1-7 of 7 + 2AP
That sense of ecosystem extends beyond artists alone. Print studios, she notes, often bring together practitioners at different ages and stages, all learning from one another. Her booth mirrors that collaborative ethos, positioning dialogue as central to the gallery model.
It also shapes the booth itself. This year, Parker is working with fair partner Alto Paint Group, introducing a colour called Latitude to the stand. The choice is more than decorative. She describes it as a way to think about the relationship between Australia and New Zealand, countries connected by invisible threads across the ocean. Furniture from Studio Italia will also be incorporated, continuing her interest in collaboration across creative industries.
There is pragmatism in Parker’s vision, too. As she puts it, she is “a one woman show,” balancing curatorial thinking with logistics, branding and the realities of fair presentation. Sightlines matter. Signage matters. Comfortable shoes matter. The glamorous image of the art world rarely accounts for how much is built through incremental refinement.
Yet the larger task remains educational. PARKER Contemporary is exhibiting within the fair’s works on paper section, an area that can carry assumptions of affordability or reproduction rather than connoisseurship and serious collecting.
“I'm a gallery that's trying to buck that assumption and go, well, actually this is all contemporary art.”
That means presenting the booth with curatorial rigour and helping visitors ask better questions.
Rather than beginning with process alone, Parker encourages audiences to start with intention: what is the artist interested in? From there, method becomes meaningful.
Image credit: Daniel Clifford, Exploded Bronze #7, 2025, Embossed relief print from exploded cast bronze on BFK Rives 39 × 34 cm. Edition 1/3
She points to artist Daniel Clifford, who was born in New Zealand and now lives in Australia. Growing up in a place where the ground could “literally rumble underneath him,” Clifford developed works using exploded bronze forms inked and pressed to reveal their imprint. The technical process is striking, but Parker insists it is secondary to the idea that drives it.
“It’s when the idea and the process come together,”
That philosophy carries through the gallery more broadly. Art fairs, for Parker, have accelerated her understanding of the wider ecosystem at a formative stage in her career. As the only Brisbane gallery attending Aotearoa Art Fair in both 2025 and 2026, she sees the role as both responsibility and opportunity.
“I think it demonstrates that Brisbane has a role to play in a much broader ecosystem,” she says.
The city may not have the density of Sydney or Melbourne, but Parker believes it offers something distinct: the capacity to think locally and globally at once. A visitor can encounter her artists in Fish Lane, Brisbane, then see the gallery in Auckland and perhaps soon further afield.
Image credit: Alethea Richter, Filtered Light II, 2024, Hand woven hand printed multilayer silkscreen, 94 × 65 × 5 cm
When asked what comes next, her ambitions are expansive: Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, Melbourne. Works on paper, after all, travel lightly. Their portability becomes an advantage, as does the clarity of the gallery’s focus.
“The wonderful thing about being a gallery that's focused on a medium that's democratic,” she says, “is that there's greater scope for us to continue being a point of difference.”
At Aotearoa Art Fair 2026, PARKER Contemporary is doing exactly that — proving that print is never just print.
Aotearoa Art Fair 2026 runs April 30 to May 3 at Viaduct Events Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
parkercontemporary.com.au
artfair.co.nz
