Emma Rogan is a contemporary painter born in 1975 in Tauranga, 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, with the help of friends, conversations with her sister, Aunties, and cousins, 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.
Selected Exhibitions:
Verity / Duplicity, Emma Rogan and Isaac Katzoff — Monterey Gallery, Auckland 2017
Artist talk — Uxbridge Arts + Culture, Bright Ideas, Auckland 2017
Gallery Denovo — Small works group show, Dunedin 2018 — 2024
Artist talk — Uxbridge Arts + Culture, Bright Ideas, Auckland 2017
Gallery Denovo — Small works group show, Dunedin 2018 — 2024
100 Days Project — founder + artist participant, from 2011 — 2018
Education:
Ba Visual Communications. Unitec, Auckland.