Kushana Bush’s paintings illuminate details of human interaction and behaviour. Adopting the modest scale of miniature traditions, her densely layered compositions draw together objects and figures from different times and realities into an idiosyncratic world of the artist’s imagining. This world invites close inspection and is alive with possibilities of multiple narratives.

Within the intimate, flattened space of Hark 2018, we shuttle between various possible interpretations of subject matter. Among a jumbled mass of human figures, some are bound and blindfolded in a manner reminiscent of historical religious paintings, some kneel in prayer, while one wields a broom and another pours water from an urn. Two dogs and a horse flail amid the scene, and Bush has added an assortment of seemingly unrelated items to the melange: a ship’s wheel, T-shirts bearing the Nike and Slazenger logos, theatrical masks, a small step stool. In the careful movement from one exquisitely wrought detail to another, what at first seems implausible becomes believable. The tightly packed pictorial space draws the viewer in to engage with the work up close, providing a window for understanding our contemporary world and the complexity of human interactions within it.

Bush began creating her miniature worlds during the early 2000s, while studying art in Dunedin. Her paintings are grounded in her childhood surrounded by Japanese woodblock prints and Indian miniatures, but she is equally alive to the rich world of illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance frescoes, and the works of twentieth-century English painter Stanley Spencer (1891–1959). Far from dispersing the message of each painting, Bush’s eclectic influences suggest a number of universal themes — love and hate, revenge and salvation, good and evil — that resonate across cultures, geography and time. As curator Justin Paton observed:

Her scenes of rapture, stoning, circumcision and soothsaying may register at first as medieval. Yet, viewed through the angled lens of allegory, this could be our global village, with its competing faiths and superstitions, its pundits and snake oil salesmen, its daily influx of trivia and trauma.¹

Bush is also highly attuned to world events, and her paintings for APT9 continue her interest in rituals and activities that bring people together. She blends both secular and religious themes, often with violent or ritualistic undertones. Figures are bound, gagged, blindfolded, suspended, ridden like beasts and trampled. They perform acts of devotion, participate in playful and erotic couplings, or are thrown together as if through some calamitous event. Providing an almost dystopian vision of contemporary life, these works nevertheless display an understanding that suffering, struggle, joy and desire are all part of our shared humanity.

Like all of her works, Kushana Bush’s new paintings are carefully planned — the complex all-over compositions are formed through a series of underdrawings on tracing paper, and the painted surface is then assembled in blocks of colour and patterned detail. The technical challenge imposed by gouache, her chosen medium, imbues each figure with an intensity and focus that separates them from the surrounding milieu. They are small parts of an elaborately constructed whole, and each one is painstakingly rendered and illuminated, resulting in intricately painted worlds that are at once sensual, intense, demanding and wondrous. Together, these paintings invite us to consider the raw messiness of the world we live in, and, in doing so, to step back for a broader view of where and who we are.

Endnote

1. Justin Paton, ‘Old weird world we live in’, in The Burning Hours: Kushana Bush [exhibition catalogue], Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, 2016, p.43.