About Emma

Emma Rodgers FRSA (b. 1974, UK)

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Emma exhibits internationally, a winner of prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum Prize whilst still at University and after Stricoff Fine Art N.Y., Lineart –Ghent , Cork Street, Royal Academy of Art, Collect at The Saatchi, S.O.F.A. Chicago and New York, Wei Ling Gallery Kuala Lumpur and in Singapore, winning National Critics Choice. Rodgers was also featured at Art Paris at the Grande Palais Paris, the Alice Mogabgab Gallery, Beirut, Curated by Luc Jacquet.

Emma has exhibited and lectured at The Prestigious Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge University. Emma has also held in several major collections, which include National Museums & Galleries, Mark Carney, Ellen Degeneres, Keanu Reeves & Pele to name just a few.

In 2017 Rodgers was commissioned by the family of Cilla Black to created a public art sculpture of "Cilla" which is now a permanent feature outside the famous Cavern Club, Liverpool in the same year she has also designed and created the worlds largest Liverbird, standing at 11 metres high.

She was awarded Woman of the Year Arts and Culture Liverpool and featured in the top 25 most influential woman in Liverpool 2018.

She has been featured in a documentary dedicated to her work on the Sky Arts Channel.

Has worked with Marvel films designing and producing sculptures for the sets of Guardians of The Galaxy and Avengers Age of Ultron.

Rodgers was also involved with The Craft Councils Firing Up Project, working with a range of schools in the North West.

In 2016 Rodgers was awarded an Honorary Fellowship with Liverpool John Moores University , which is recognized as the University's highest honour. Since then she has worked collaboratively on a number of project including The British Style Collective and Roscoe Lecture awards most recently presented to Mark Carney, Chairman of the Bank of England.

Rodgers has exhibited and lectured at The Prestigious Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge University.

Emma is a Patron for Clatterbridge Cancer Centre of which she works closely with. In the last year her work has raised £100,000 for The Michael Josephson Ball of which she has been involved with for a number of years. She also supports a range of other charities in the North West including , St Johns Hospice, Claire House and Variety to name just a few.

She has received acclaim for her energy and dynamic approach to her work. She featured in Best of British, Singapore on which she won National Critics Choice. Held in several major collections, National Museums Liverpool acquired pieces of Rodger’s work which are now on display at the Walker Art Gallery.

Sculptor Emma Rodgers is one of the most sought after - and highly collectable - artists working in Britain today. Art critic David Whiting believes her to be amongst the foremost ceramic sculptors working anywhere in the world.

“Emma Rodgers arts gets straight to the core of her subject. She really inhabits the spirit of her creatures, just as they inhabit hers. It is about the flesh and bone beneath the skin, pulsing visceral forms that express the physicality and raw energy of the animal world. There is something dark about this vision too – nature at its most untamed. Her creative process involves not only great technical skill and acute observation, but powerful intuition and imagination. This is what makes Emma’s work so fresh and alive.”

Emma has pioneered new boundaries for age-old mediums of clay and bronze pushing them to the edge of their elasticity to create powerful, challenging, delicate, tender, disturbing and yet ethereally beautiful statuary.

She has deliberately abandoned the solidity of form traditionally associated with both classical and modern sculptural movements enabling her to move into original realms of statement by omission.

Her work, whilst solid, has at times a gossamer lightness that can make it appear sketched rather than cast or moulded.

And the constant genius of her exoskeletal forms is that they always depict what can’t be seen but is transversally present: the life force that may be called soul, or chi, or spirit or chakra.

A winner of prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum Prize whilst still at art college, Emma is now member of London’s elite Chelsea Arts Club.

- David Whiting

Art Critic and Writer

Emma Rodgers has long attracted equally positive publicity and her career has led her to work internationally on a number of high-profile projects, as well as many in her native Wirral and Liverpool. Rodgers took a number of key turns early on in her career, with unwavering support from colleagues and teachers. While studying for her MA in Wolverhampton she was compelled to return home because of her mother’s serious health concerns. She resumed her studies more locally but this, in turn, allowed her greater access to, and support from, the local community.

Originally trained as a ceramist and glass artist, Rodgers then developed her style in bronze, realising her clay forms as metallic works, which are often editioned. Rodgers has achieved something which few artists rarely do – combining genuine popularity and critical acclaim. The former builds on her close links within the highly supportive environment of her native city, for Rodgers makes no particular distinction between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

Writing about her work, the critic David Whiting has commented, that Rodgers is “…now recognised as one of Britain’s leading ceramic sculptors…” adding that her animal and human figures have “…a heightened sense of movement or tension, absorbed in the trials and dramas of existence.”

Whiting’s observations about the power and life-force of Rodgers’ depictions of nature have great validity. On seeing her work in the flesh for the first time (viewing online is no substitute for the visceral, tactile, sensory response her work engenders when in close physical proximity) I was immediately reminded of the work of Leonard Baskin, who collaborated with Ted Hughes on ‘Crow’, a sequence of poems featuring the eponymous part-creature, part-god, part-human. My thoughts were also carried to the work of Dame Elisabeth Frink and to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, in ‘The Windhover’, described the movement of a bird of prey in swooping, tearing, consonantal clusters, alliterative knots and jarring syntax. The poem finds a physical equivalent in ‘Sky God 2’ where Rodgers’ kinetic manipulations of clay are transfixed in bronze.

- Dr Giles Hansen Sutherland

Art Critic, The Times

Honorary Fellowship at

Liverpool John Moores University

The Fellowship of Liverpool John Moores University

Each year at Graduation the University's highest honour - an Honorary Fellowship - is bestowed on a select band of individuals outside the University, in recognition of their outstanding achievement in a given field or profession, and who personify and inspire others.

Acceptance Speech

It is a great privilege for me to be here today to receive this honorary fellowship surrounded by fellow artists and emerging talent, especially in such a beautiful setting for your Graduation.

The kind introduction by Pauline Daniels, touched upon some of the highlights of my career to this point, however the real story is the collection of people, places and experiences which mould us and fashion our Art. I have great family, tutors, Gallerists and patrons which have inspired me and given me the confidence to spark my imagination but most of all they have given me friendship.

This career has taken me into many worlds which I would never have encountered, from veterinary theatres to Marvels space ships and I never thought I would receive such an honour as today, but when you apply yourself with dedication and enthusiasm to things that you love, others may recognise the beauty and strength of our endeavours.

My husband often teases me that I have a lot of qualifications but they are only in Art. But Art is everywhere and the beginning of everything, from the clothes that we wear to the houses we live in, it is not only on canvas and in bronze it is woven into the fabric of every choice we make.

If I could just share a few thoughts, it would be, surround yourself with positive people, make the most of opportunities, try not to burn bridges, keep an enquiring mind, weave your plans with passion, indulge your creativity and above all be kind.