Kushana Bush / New Zealand

New Zealand born 1983

Kushana Bush considers herself a contemporary storyteller. She paints highly detailed multiple-figure compositions in which enigmatic and often violent narratives unfold. The critic David Eggleton has described her style as ‘eccentric historicism’. Bush draws on various historical and stylistic sources, from medieval Christian art to Indo-Persian miniatures and Japanese woodblock prints. In each scene, the joyous colour and decorative quality is undercut by a pervasive sense of threat and claustrophobia that derives from the crowded compositions and the actions and gestures of the figures.

Kushana Bush has said of her work that ‘borrowing and adapting imagery, not of my time or place – and crucially, getting it wrong – somehow produces pictures that speak of the here and now. I’m very attracted to that cycle of collapsing interpretations, it keeps you yearning’. In many of her images Bush depicts groups of people on a stage, with some directly involved in the action, while others look on. She sees this as a metaphor for watching world events from Dunedin, New Zealand, describing herself as one of the ‘lucky observers, who lick ice creams while the world implodes’.

BIO

Bush studied at the Otago School of Art in Dunedin, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2004. In 2011 she was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship through the University of Otago, and in 2009 completed a residency in Seoul through the Arts Centre/ Asia New Zealand Foundation.