About the Artist
Emma Bass studied photography in Auckland and pursued it as a full time career about 30 years ago, building a considerable reputation as a go-to practitioner for the quality of her portraiture, interiors and other commercial work.
She began exhibiting fine art photography with a series exploring the reality of pregnancy and motherhood. The Imperfect series later focused on unexpected images of flora, beautifully arranged in vintage vases, but finding beauty in the imperfect, aging or wilting. More recent works layer photography with painted elements, or introduced bugs and insects.
Recent Works
Bass draws us in with palpable textures, sublime colours, flower arrangements perfectly lit. Then you realise things are not as they seem, that she has made something exquisite of flora beginning to fade, fall, wilt – the reality of ageing. There’s an undercurrent of humour: a tulip gracefully tipping to kiss the table; comical red hot pokers on snaking stems searching to escape the formal vase; life’s rejects—thistles, weeds—elevated to celebrity status in formal poses, translucent beauties. Insects lurk in dark spaces, or stalk the petals of a peony.
Her limited edition works appear studio-lit, yet most often are captured on a ledge at her Auckland home. She references centuries of European paintings of fruit and flowers as a metaphor for life, but her work owes more to the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi, an acceptance of the integrity of things as they are. She matches the subject flora with one of her large collection of vintage vases, some Crown Lynn, others acquired from around the world.
