When you're making art it's like you're in sort of a state … where you make connections in ways that you don't normally make them, that's more like a dream.

The development of the image is what's exciting to me and it happens as I'm working. There's an initial image of something that I'm interested in but I don't do studies. I like to work on drawings at the same time I'm working on a painting and they complement each other.

[Rocca was a] fiercely original artist whose hieroglyphic, phantasmagoric work poked a finger in the eye of late-20th-century modernist purities.

My work has always been autobiographical.

Maintained throughout her decades-long career was an unceasing commitment to capturing the perplexities and the appetites of woman. Rocca was never as literal as to conspicuously depict powerlessness or oppression, instead she invented bodies and aggregated signs to wrestle with the ebbing authority of gender in everyday life and the culture at large.

The imagery in my work from the Hairy Who period was more about external things, things from the culture. The work starting in the early ’80s was more about what was going on with me internally.

Rocca’s wonderfully illogical sense of space and the barbed femininity of her symbols are a winning combination.

Rocca is giving us a new lexicon with these images, a way of reevaluating the everyday to see its magical worth.