Kirsty Budge 'Bridge and Tunnel'

Kirsty Budge
Bridge and Tunnel
26 July - 13 September 2025
Opening 2-4pm Saturday 26 JUly

Kirsty Budge’s paintings emerge from a process of deep introspection and an interest in psychoanalysis and philosophy that seeks to embrace the richness of the world in all its absurdity and poignance. Her works emphasise ambiguous thresholds of everyday experience, visually describing how one’s inner life records and reflects upon sensible perceptions of the external world through a painterly mix of figuration, abstraction, personal narrative and cultural imagery.

In Budge’s process, the removal of paint is equal to its application. Layering and excavation are vital to the construction of the composition, as forms that initially appear to be at the forefront of the work are actually exposed remnants of the past underpainting. This continual process of re-inscription stems from the artist’s understanding of the ever shifting relationship between memory, dreams and perspective as guided by intuitive and unconscious processes. 

The works of Bridge and Tunnel were created across the past year as Budge travelled between New York, Napier, the Blue Mountains and Naarm/Melbourne. They emerge from Budge’s desire to explore her relationship to the shifting environmental and psychological spaces inhabited across these different sites, and how boundaries between self and other, body and world are re-negotiated through both the experience of being in transit, and the process of making of a painting. The show is particularly informed by her experience spending several months in New York: a place saturated with cinematic myth and a sense of possibility, that also often serves up poignant reminders of the social and economic inequalities embedded within the ‘American Dream'. The paintings depict her experience navigating new cities, landmarks, personalities, housing and public transport as sites that produce new encounters, voids and potentialities. Budge takes on the role of voyeur and chronicler of the everyday theatre of life as it plays out across public and private space, colliding fragments of theatrical and pedestrian drama into a swirling soup of the unconscious.