Emma Bass has made her reputation as an artist with her colourful and flamboyant photographs of flowers. Not that her career began this way, for her current works have had a long gestation period. She associated with artists while growing up and did life drawing in the school holidays. In the 1980s, she also took an evening course in etching with Carole Shepheard at the Auckland Society of Arts. As a teenager she thought of going to Elam School of Fine Arts but eventually decided on a career in nursing. She went to London as a nurse for a few years where her artistic interests remained strong, and she took black-and-white photographs with a Pentax camera. She studied photography at the Leicester Square Camera Club in the evenings. Her works of this time range between abstractions and reportage of everyday life in the city. They have a stark, gritty quality which seems direct and uncontrived.
On her return to New Zealand, she attended an Elam summer school with Anne Noble which motivated her to study photography at Unitec. There, at the Chiaroscuro Gallery in downtown Auckland which was reviewed favourably by T.J. McNamara. This show she says was about the paradoxes and contradictions of pregnancy and motherhood. She photographed herself and others nude while pregnant in a graphic manner, in one image putting out the washing on a rotary clothesline. There is a mix of black-and-white and colour images. In one striking photograph, a woman is silhouetted in bright red against a plain background with superimposed and double-exposed yellow flowers. The approach moves beyond literal recording of the subject matter to a more emotional and expressive style relating to the hard-edge forms of the painter Pat Hanly whose works she admired.
