Emma Collins is a South Australian portrait and figurative painter fascinated by people — what we believe, how we behave, the roles we perform and the stories we construct about who we are.

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Her paintings often begin with a question.

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Why do we perform for one another? How much of our identity is actually ours? Why can two people look at the same thing and see something entirely different? And what happens when we question something we've spent our whole lives assuming to be true?

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These questions become portraits and figurative works that combine chiaroscuro, expressive mark-making and psychological tension. Emma is particularly drawn to the human face: its ability to reveal, conceal and contradict, sometimes all at once.

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Her interest in human behaviour isn't accidental. With a background in psychology and graphic design, Emma spent years studying people before making them the centre of her artistic practice. She later developed her fine-art practice through the Milan Art Institute's Mastery Program.

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Today, her work sits somewhere between portraiture, psychology and philosophy.

But Emma isn't particularly interested in telling the viewer what a painting means.

She'd rather make you curious.

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"I'm more interested in the question a painting leaves you with than the answer I could give you."

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Based on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, Emma creates original paintings, portraiture and exhibition bodies that examine the fascinating, absurd and occasionally uncomfortable business of being human.