Rosa Allison (b. 1993, Ōtautahi Christchurch) is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based artist and gardener.
Allison draws inspiration from those forms, patterns, and structures she observes in nature, lyrically transposing them onto the canvas. Her vibrant abstract works recall female modernist painters including Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Pelton. She is interested in the influences of lunar cycles upon physiological health and fertility as well as astrophysical impacts upon ecosystems, and the planting and harvesting of crops.
Allison has created a witch’s garden, planting healing, poisonous, and magical plants, and has recently been privileged to spend time learning about Rongoā Māori – the traditional Māori healing system that uses indigenous plants to promote health and wellbeing.
Allison studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch and later gained a Masters in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. Allison has exhibited internationally and was shortlisted for the Beers Contemporary Award for Emerging Art in 2019. She returned to Aotearoa in 2020. Recent exhibitions include The Secret Life of Plants at Melanie Roger Gallery, BUNCH at Page Galleries, Howling at drive-thru, The Witches Herbarium at Chambers Gallery, and Journey to Kilbirnie at Toi Pōneke.
Rebecca Hawkes has penned a beautifully fecund text to accompany Rosa Allison's exhibition, in the preamble to which, she writes of the pair spending time together in Mexico City.
"Far from the root-bound rubber plants straining their pots in the flats of Wellington, the ficus trees of Mexico City loom higher than any buildings that might hold them, dripping latex lavishly into the gutters. Rosa and I met under their canopies while she backpacked through the country, living out of a tramping pack that contained a sheaf of gouache paintings - early sketches for this body of work. After days exploring the city’s galleries and alleyways, running home through flooding streets in the soak of the daily summer thunderstorms, we spent our evenings quietly. We feasted on sweet nectars - fragrant guavas and custardy sapote, tearing the crocodilian skin from the flesh of an enormous guanábana. After dinner, Rosa would light a candle and paint at the kitchen table, finding her way toward the distinctive forms immortalised in these final paintings while I curled on the couch to write. It is a true delight to see these now manifested in their fullest incarnation, and to share these dreams of flight."
Rebecca Hawkes is a poet and painter from a farm near Methven. Her debut book, Meat Lovers (AUP, 2022) won Best International First Collection in the Laurel Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. Rebecca is a founding member of popstar poets' posse Show Ponies, and is co-editor of the literary journal Sweet Mammalian and the climate poetry anthology No Other Place To Stand. She is the winner of Palette Poetry’s Sappho Prize and Salt Hill's Philip Booth Poetry Prize, and her work can be found in journals like Cordite, HAD, Landfall, and New Delta Review. She holds a Masters’ in Creative Nonfiction from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and is currently a Fulbright Scholar pursuing an MFA in Poetry in the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan.
You can read the full text here.
