Rosa Allison is a painter based in Te Whanganui‑a‑Tara (Wellington) whose practice engages plant‑based subject matter as a critical means of examining perception, materiality, and more‑than‑human relationality. Her work approaches botanical forms not as illustrative motifs but as conceptual frameworks through which questions of care, temporality, and embodied experience are explored.

Situated between figuration and abstraction, Allison’s paintings utilise layered surfaces, restrained chromatic palettes, and deliberate mark‑making to resist fixed interpretation. Process and duration are foregrounded as generative forces, allowing meaning to accrue through repetition, attenuation, and subtle shifts in form.

Allison has exhibited across Aotearoa New Zealand, including The Secret Life of Plants at Melanie Roger Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, a curated group exhibition that positioned contemporary painting within broader ecological, spiritual, and speculative conversations surrounding plant intelligence and interspecies connection. Within this context, Allison’s work contributed a quiet, material attentiveness to growth, fragility, and sustained observation. 

At Page Gallery in Te Whanganui‑a‑Tara, Allison’s work has been featured in both group and solo presentations that extend her inquiry into botanical form and embodied experience. In 2024 she was included in BUNCH, a group exhibition exploring art’s historical and contemporary engagements with plant imagery alongside established practitioners and significant works from New Zealand’s art history. Her 2025 solo exhibition Flying Dreams transformed the gallery’s spaces with vibrant abstractions inspired by natural forms, lunar and ecological rhythms, and spiritual associations with plant life; the show was informed by preparatory work made during travel in Central America and by her ongoing cultivation of a local “witch’s garden,” where healing, poisonous, and magical plants become both source and subject. This exhibition was supported in part by a Creative New Zealand early‑career Visual Arts grant, enabling research, materials, and exhibition development that expanded Allison’s practice and visibility within the national arts ecology. 

At Chambers, Allison’s work featured in The Witches’ Herbarium, a thematically driven exhibition investigating herbalism, folklore, and contemporary ecological inquiry. In this context, her contributions emphasised the cultural and affective resonances of plant knowledge, engaging with witchcraft histories, feminist reinterpretations of botanical lore, and the material traces of cultivation and ritual.

In addition to her painting practice, Allison undertook a printmaking residency at Auckland Print Studio (APS) in Tāmaki Makaurau, where she expanded investigations of plant forms through intaglio and relief processes. This residency supported a cross‑disciplinary approach to mark‑making and material experimentation, informing an ongoing dialogue between painting, printmaking, and ecological attentiveness.

Allison’s practice contributes to contemporary discourse around eco‑aesthetics and attentive modes of looking, proposing painting and printmaking as sustained, relational engagements with the more‑than‑human world.

Rosa Allison is currently completing a residency at Drivng Creek Pottery.  She will exhibit new paintings with Melanie Roger Gallery in April 2026.