The Floral
Effect Project
Primavera
Auckland City Hospital
9th Floor, Maternity
In an increasingly fractured world, the human need for beauty is more urgent than ever.
Flowers accompany significant moments across many cultures and traditions – yet how photographic floral imagery affects people in contemporary clinical and care settings remains largely untested.
Physiological and psychological responses to nature, art and imagery have been studied for decades. The Floral Effect Project seeks to extend this research with specific emphasis on the study of the natural and artificial and the impact of naturalistic floral art in clinical and care environments.
The Project is based in Aotearoa New Zealand. It draws on fourteen years of practice in placing floral photography in these settings. It utilises design research methodologies and draws from a growing international evidence base.
The Project is currently developing a formal study to test its ideas and has not yet begun collecting its own research data. It focuses on the following three lines of inquiry:
Can choices of scale, placement, and composition in large-scale floral art reduce stress within high-pressure clinical environments?
Can depicting the full natural life cycle, from pristine bloom to the quiet dignity of decay, support psychological acceptance in palliative care?
Can integrating complex visual imagery into high-fatigue medical workplaces improve cognitive restoration and wellbeing for healthcare staff?
Emma Bass trained as a registered nurse and grew up in hospitals, the child of a cardiologist and radiographer. At ten she painted on the glass windows of a coronary care unit. Fourteen years of placements followed — large-scale floral photographic works placed in hospices, oncology units, hospital wards, aged care facilities, funeral homes, and stillbirth and bereavement units across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.
These installations are not commissioned as passive decoration; they are made in response to observed clinical need. The reception of these works by patients, families, and clinical staff has generated a substantial body of qualitative evidence concerning the psychological effects of floral imagery in care contexts. This evidence forms the origin and motivation of our current research.
Selected placements
Floral and nature imagery is consistently rated as more attractive, calming and pleasant – one of the more reliable findings in this field. A large 2026 replication study found no corresponding difference in physiological recovery, leaving open whether the benefit is mainly about preference rather than a deeper physiological pathway.
Across several clinical studies, decorative interventions consistently improved how patients rated their environment; effects on pain, blood pressure or medication use were inconsistent, and none found a shorter hospital stay. Whether floral imagery could do more remains open.
Floral and nature images are linked to a modest, immediate lift in self-reported mood in laboratory settings. Whether that lift holds outside the lab, or reaches people who can't verbally self-report, is still being worked out.
Whether these effects last beyond the moment of viewing, and whether a photograph can substitute for the real thing, are questions this literature has not yet answered – ones The Floral Effect intends to help answer through its own future research.
Our initial work addresses an under-researched question: what happens, psychologically and physiologically, when people encounter photographic representations of flowers in clinical spaces? Operating from Aotearoa New Zealand, the project is building connections with clinicians, researchers, and institutions across the world.
Dementia Care Study
A feasibility study examining the psychological response of dementia patients to floral photographic works placed in a London care home. Beginning June 2026.
Commencing NowSurrey, United Kingdom
The inaugural multidisciplinary workshop uniting fragmented research on human responses to flowers across psychology, neuroscience, horticulture, design, and the arts. Organised by the University of Surrey Institute of Advanced Studies, the workshop aims to pioneer a new interdisciplinary field. Emma Bass and Aaron Fry are presenting on the practice of placing large-scale floral photographic art in clinical and care environments.
Dunedin, New Zealand
Cumulus — Design at the End of the Earth, Dunedin, 2026. Presenting research on Emma Bass's floral photographic works in clinical spaces, within this year's theme of Hope and Design.
Gerontology Framework
The Artwork of Emma Bass: Amplifying wellness in aged, clinical and therapeutic care environments. NZ Association of Gerontology, 1 November 2022.
The Floral Effect Project is building connections with clinical environments, environmental psychologists, and design researchers. If you are interested in our approach, introducing our artwork into care spaces where it can make a meaningful difference, or working in collaboration with us on data collection, we invite you to connect.
The Floral Effect Project sits at the intersection of practice and inquiry. The researchers bring together fine art, nursing, and design cognition: disciplines that share a concern with how environments shape human experience.
Emma Bass grew up around hospitals. Her father was a cardiologist, her mother a radiographer. At ten years old she painted on the internal window of a coronary care unit, watching what happened when colour and image entered a clinical space.
She trained and worked as a registered nurse in Auckland before building a twenty-two year career as a commercial photographer. In 2012 she shifted to fine art practice, working exclusively with flowers. Her work has been acquired by private collectors internationally, exhibited twice at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, and placed in clinical and care environments across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Auckland City Hospital holds over 20 of her works. She collaborates with Breast Cancer Cure New Zealand on a luxury scarf collection, with proceeds directed to research.
Her practice sits at an unusual intersection: fine art, clinical knowledge, and more than fourteen years of direct observation. The Floral Effect Project is the formal attempt to investigate the questions that practice has raised.
Aaron Fry trained as a fine artist at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, before completing an MFA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He built an international design career that included a tenured faculty position at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he co-directed the Visualizing Finance Lab and developed a research practice around design cognition, information visualisation, and how designed artefacts shape perception and behaviour.
He returned to Aotearoa New Zealand as Director of the MDes programme at the School of Engineering and Design, University of Auckland, and is completing a PhD in Design at Swinburne University of Technology. His research spans design cognition, the psychology of visual artefacts, and the relationship between designed environments and human wellbeing. His central question, what does design do to human experience, is what drew him to The Floral Effect Project. The collaboration with Emma Bass brings design research methodology and academic rigour to a body of qualitative evidence accumulating in clinical settings for over a decade.
We welcome approaches from researchers, clinicians, institutions and designers with aligned interests, in Aotearoa New Zealand or internationally.
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