BIO

Emma Rogan is a contemporary painter residing and working in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Her still-life and figurative works explore ideas of femininity, care, female mahi and cultural belonging.

Rogan grew up outside of her father’s culture and at a distance from any of her Samoan family — without tradition, customs or language — despite this, she always felt her own Samoan-ness as a deep internal knowing and bodily experience. This sensing and feeling is what she explores through an ongoing body of work began in 2019, seeking to make material the forgotten and lost. These explorations lead her to wonder — “If I turn inward into these senses and feelings, what will come out in the work? Will I even be Samoan at all? What can be recalled?”

This slow, persistent work Rogan calls her ‘Ancestral Mahi’ — a term gifted to her in passing during an exchange with the artist Coco Solid.

Historical family photos, stories, and material objects become precious heirlooms and cultural conduits. Research, reading, and conversations with her sister, Aunties, cousins and peers, fill in some gaps and create others. She dreams about a shark. In Apia she wakes three nights in a row to a strange presence in her hotel room. Her understanding of her family is fragmented, there is much she can never know. Rogan paints from this place, to reckon with the past, to process her grief, confusion and love — and to collapse time in an effort to commune with her ancestors.

CV

Born 1975 in Tauranga, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Resides in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

EDUCATION
1994 — 1998, Ba Visual Arts (VisComm) Unitec, Auckland.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2017, Verity Duplicity — Emma Rogan & Isaac Katzoff, Monterey Gallery, Auckland.
2018, Gallery Denovo Small Works Group Show, Dunedin.
2019, Gallery Denovo Small Works Group Show, Dunedin.

TALKS/PRESENTATIONS
2017, Artist talk — Uxbridge Arts + Culture, Bright Ideas, Auckland.