11/05/2026
Artist Conversations | Emma Bennett
Last month Emma Bennett presented Oralcon, a deeply personal body of work exploring the realities of living with endometriosis and the long-term impact of hormonal contraceptives.
We chatted with Emma on the ideas behind the exhibition and her creative journey.
Q. Your exhibition Oralcon explores the experience of hormonal contraceptives and the unseen changes they create. What first made you want to start this conversation through your work?
Emma: I've been exploring how art can serve as a means of processing and documenting grief. Through making, I’m navigating the emotional and physical landscape of living with endometriosis, using creation as both expression and a tool for healing.
From there, I started to look at how pain is managed, which for me and many others has been through hormonal contraceptives. That led me to questions of identity - how hormones have shaped my body and who I am as a person. I keep asking myself who would I be if I hadn’t taken those pills, and that opened up the wider themes of the project.
Q 2. How has living with endometriosis shaped the way you think about your body and your work?
E. My art practice has become a process of processing. A lot of the time, our subconscious has a strong influence on embodied making.
Art helps me understand how I’m feeling, rather than trying to make work about my feelings. It allows me to take what’s inside my body - the disease, the pain, the emotions - and make it exist outside of me. It creates space between me and it.
Q 3. Why is art the medium for this?
E. I see art as a universal language. It’s always been my voice and my outlet.
As someone with learning disabilities and ADHD, I’ve often struggled to feel fully
understood through traditional forms of communication, but making art just makes sense to me. It’s where I can actually say what I’m trying to say.
With this illness, you can go years being ignored or not taken seriously. It can feel like you ask for help so many times, that your words lose their weight and become invisible. Saying it through art is an act of defiance - if you’re not going to listen, then I’m going to show you.
Q 4. This work touches on things many women experience but don’t often talk about openly. What has it been like turning that into something visible?
E. It can feel vulnerable. There’s a constant balance between what feels important to share, and what I’d like to keep private.
We live in a society where women have been taught to be quiet, to behave, and to manage things internally. It’s not that women’s health isn’t talked about, it’s that it’s so often minimised or silenced.
I can only speak from my own experience, but I hope to inspire people to listen. At the very least, I hope someone sees my art and learns the word ‘endometriosis’.
In a perfect world, speaking about my body wouldn’t feel political or radical, it would just be that - simply speaking about my body. The fact that it shows why feminism, and the continued push for women’s healthcare and visibility, is still so important. I feel proud to contribute, even in a small way, to a space that is pushing for greater understanding, care, and recognition.
Q 5. You bought this work back to Hawke’s Bay after studying in Wellington. What does it mean to share it here, with a local audience?
E. It feels both powerful and incredibly vulnerable to bring this work back home. Much of the lived experience I’m drawing from - and the system I’m critiquing - is rooted here, so sharing it feels deeply personal.
There’s something significant about having my voice and experiences seen in the same place they were once overlooked and confined to waiting lists. It feels like a reclaiming of space.
Hawke’s Bay has such a strong and growing arts community. There’s a real sense of care and connection, and it will always be home to me.
Q 6. If someone sees this work and recognises something of their own experience in it, what would you hope they feel?
E. I hope people feel however they need to feel. I have felt so, so many emotions when making this work. Its pain, its anger, its depression, its tiredness, its frustration.
If someone resonates with it, I hope they sit with that feeling, acknowledge it, and show some love and kindness to it.
And for those who see themselves in it, especially in feeling like a number in a system that doesn't take women seriously, I hope they know they’re not alone. You are not dramatic, you are not making it up, your pain is so very valid and may it one day subside.
You can view Emma's exhibition online at https://www.artsinc.co.nz/whats-on/view/oralcon-emma-bennett
You can follow Emma on Instagram at .makes.art
