Patty
Rogers

Patty Rogers received her BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1986 and her MFA from California State University, Fullerton in 1989. She has lived and worked on Bainbridge Island, Washington for more than two decades, and has been exhibiting at the Roby King Gallery on the island since 1999. Her practice is built from paper — layers of collaged papers form the surface, which she then draws into with conte crayon and builds with acrylic paint and printmaking techniques. The panels are mounted on thick wood rather than framed, giving the work a physical presence that matches the density of its surfaces. She thinks of papers as sustainable materials, both ancient and new.

She starts with language. Titles come first — drawn from conversations, something read, something overheard, something witnessed. In Siblings’ Lower Garden, Borders Wetlands, Against a densely layered ground of torn cream, gray, and pale green papers—their fibers and edges deliberately visible—a single stem with burnt orange and red flowers branches upward in stark silhouette. The blooms themselves are rendered in gouache or watercolor with careful gradations from deep crimson to golden amber, their petals spreading in five-pointed formations with visible yellow stamens, creating a sharp chromatic contrast that reads almost aggressively against the muted, weathered background. The composition divides the vertical rectangle into busy texture above and below, with the flowering stem occupying only the right-center passage, leaving substantial empty collaged area that dominates the frame. The work risks a certain sentimentality in its presentation of delicate nature against decay, though the aggressive handling of the paper ground—torn, layered, stained—undercuts any precious reading of botanical representation. The Kotodama of Now works differently: Three stylized koi fish rendered in opaque white and brilliant red-scarlet dominate the composition's right half, their bodies layered atop degraded photocopied documents and handwritten East Asian characters that create a palimpsestic ground. The fish—articulated with bold black outlines and spotted with red and black circular markings—float at diagonal angles across the surface, their fins and tails extending into the left side where they encounter a darker, more densely textured field of sepia-toned reproductions and geometric patterning. The collage technique itself becomes the subject: sheets of aged paper buckle and overlap with visible adhesive lines tracing the fish's edges, making the assembly process tactile and insistent rather than seamless. There's an uncomfortable compression here between the decorative legibility of the koi and the obliterated archive they swim through, as if beauty and historical erasure occupy the same space without resolution. The titles — Homushiku, The Kotodama of Now (kotodama: the spirit of language in Japanese tradition) — carry that same orientation toward the meaning embedded in words and in place. She uses itajine (folded and colored Japanese paper) in her collages and has incorporated calligraphy; travels to Southeast Asia thread through the work.

Her 2017 solo exhibition “Joys Within Reach” at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and a 2018 commission for Virginia Mason Clinic on Bainbridge Island — fifteen lino-cuts printed on collaged papers depicting native Northwest plants, chosen in consultation with the clinic staff — represent the depth of her roots in this community. Her work is held in the permanent collections of BIMA, the University of Washington Medical Center, the City of Bremerton’s Norm Dicks Government Building, Dorsey & Whitney LLP, and Via Radiology in Seattle.

I use the remembered outside world and contrast the observed inner world to interpret and make sense of things. I begin with a working title. My titles evolve from words, conversations, something written, something overheard, something read, something witnessed, something felt. In naming these bodies of work or individual pieces, the titles become invitations, launching points for my visual ideas.