About

Biography

Dr Emma Rochester is an Australian contemporary ceramic artist and practice-led researcher based in Perth, Western Australia. She holds a PhD in Fine Art from Griffith University. Her multi-modal practice spans ceramics, video art, drawing, painting, photography, textiles including weaving and sewn form, integrating material inquiry with embodied research methodologies.

Rochester’s work explores regenerative aesthetics, spatial perception, and material intelligence, positioning studio practice as a site of embodied knowledge production. Her research and exhibition activity operate across Australia and Europe, maintaining an active dialogue between regional material conditions and European architectural traditions.

Contemporary Multi-Modal Practice and Embodied Research

Rochester’s practice is grounded in ceramics while extending across video, photography, textiles, painting and drawing. Working through a practice-led methodology, she approaches material processes as modes of inquiry rather than illustration. Clay, fibre, sculpture, surface and image function as responsive systems through which perception, memory and transformation are explored.

Her research develops the concept of embodied scholarship. An approach to art making that situates knowledge within sensory engagement, spatial awareness and material responsiveness. Within this framework, making is not secondary to theory; it is a primary mode of thinking. Surface, weight, repetition and gesture operate as epistemic tools. The artist is the instrument.

Regenerative aesthetics underpin this practice. Rather than treating materials as passive resources, Rochester engages them as relational participants within cycles of formation, erosion, firing, stitching and repair. This orientation situates contemporary art practice within broader ecological and cultural conversations around care, sustainability and transformation.

Based in Perth, her work is informed by the spatial conditions of Western Australia. Light, colour and landscape inform her art practice while maintaining conceptual and material dialogue with European architectural and aesthetic traditions, particularly those encountered through engagement with Venice and Italian material culture.

Research Trajectory

Rochester’s evolving research trajectory extends from material practice into relational and perceptual inquiry. Building on embodied methodologies developed through her doctoral research, she examines how aesthetic presence, attentional practice and creative process inform broader questions of relational awareness and care.

This expanded field of inquiry does not depart from studio practice but grows from it, positioning art as a site through which material, perceptual and relational knowledge intersect. Through multi-modal practice and scholarly research, her work bridges studio, research and relational contexts while maintaining a rigorous commitment to embodied and regenerative thinking.