Joy Roggenkamp was born in Roma and moved to Brisbane with her family prior to World War Two. In 1943, she began private lessons with painter Percy Stanhope Hobday and the following year attended Brisbane’s Central Technical College. Finding the course restricting, she resumed private tuition in 1945 and joined the Royal Queensland Art Society’s Younger Artists’ Group and the Miya Studio, founded by Laurence Collinson, Laurence Hope, Pamela Seeman and Cecel Knopke in opposition to Brisbane’s conservative art establishment. In 1946, Roggenkamp showed work in Miya Studio’s second exhibition at the Canberra Hotel, where Brisbane poet Barrett Reid recognised her as a ‘fresh expressionist watercolourist’.  

In 1947, Roggenkamp met Sidney Nolan, who had recently moved from Melbourne to Brisbane, and would spend time sketching and painting with him in Cairns later that year. In 1949, Roggenkamp showed work from this trip in a joint exhibition with her brother Ken at the Moreton Galleries. Church at Sandgate c.1949 reveals glimpses of the expressive direction Roggenkamp would pursue after beginning classes with Jon Molvig in 1956.