BIO

Emma Roche is a painter and mixed media artist based in Massachusetts. She graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in 2021 with a BFA in Illustration. Emma has a passion for portraiture, bodies, horror, gore, and all things queer.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work concentrates on our relationships with the body and how bodily transformation can communicate identity, history, and otherness. This most recent work is representative of the ways I have been integrating painting, collage, and photomontage to that end. Recently, I started creating digital photomontages to use as reference for my paintings. I feel that I’ve found a process that allows me to break down and utilize the barrage of images I’m met with everyday on the internet. My enthusiasm for this process then led me back to analog collage. This mixed media approach allows me to further explore the contradictions contained in my work. We are all many things at once, such as beautiful and ugly, prideful and shameful, fearful and brave, boundless and inhibited. This has inspired me to use collage material in unlikely ways, such as putting soft linens and floral imagery into violent contexts. The same intention is behind my color palette: pinks and reds are often associated with femininity, love, and romance, but can also represent raw flesh and spilled blood.