Kirsty budge
brown mirror: paintings from behind
3 APRIL - 11 MAY 2024
OPENING 2-4PM SATURDAY 6 APRIL
In Brown Mirror: Paintings from Behind, Kirsty Budge sees her paintings as portals to subterranean worlds and her role in painting them “acts as some kind of connective tissue between the past and the present as well as with a paradoxical intention to transcend both”. Budge’s paintings emerge from a process of deep introspection, external observation and an interest in psychoanalysis and philosophy that embraces the complexity of how we experience the world. The paintings combine an ambiguous mix of figuration and abstraction, referencing nature, connectivity, eerie repetitions and a quest for meaning.
The “Brown Mirror” of the title refers to both the earth-toned underpainting of the canvas and the brown hued waters of the Birrarung (Yarra River), Budge sees both the canvas and the body of water signifying sites of abyss and potential. Many of the paintings reference fluids and bodies of water, as substances analogous to both painting and memory. This liquid motif marks a shifting of boundaries in the ability to leak, pour and flood. The paintings reflect on the pooling of memory across vast distances of time, place and bodies, seeking to capture a topography of the landscape as it is reflected, distorted and internalised by the subjects that dwell in it.
The “Behind” of the title refers to Budge’s process of constructing her works, the shadow work and labour of creation, and also to deeper symbolic readings. Budge writes: “In a philosophical and metaphorical sense the Brown Mirror is a subterranean portal that engages all facets of the psyche. The Brown Mirror is a formless realm vast in depth with a surface both transparent and dense that resists a definitive interpretation. It’s an underworld containing imaginary grottoes of the subconscious, a sort of counter-universe one can inhabit to experience freedom and a fluid existence, all within the paradoxical boundaries and limitations of the painting medium.”
In Carl Jung's book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious he wrote “the way of the soul in search of its lost father leads to the water, to the dark mirror that reposes at the bottom. Whoever has elected for the state of spiritual poverty goes the way of the soul that leads to the water. This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche.”
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Kirsty Budge is an Aotearoa/New Zealand-born artist based in Melbourne/Naarm. In 2024 she will exhibit in a solo presentation at NADA New York. Recent exhibitions include FAIR by NADA, New York (Daine Singer, 2020); Melbourne Art Fair (Daine Singer, 2024, 2020 and 2022); (I’ve got) half a mind, (2022), If you’re gonna spew, spew into this (2020); The Doing (2019), Gawkalitis (2017), Daine Singer, Melbourne; NADA New York (Daine Singer, 2018); The Painters are In, Spring 1883 (Daine Singer, 2016), and I’m not desperate, you’re desperate, Sarah Scout Presents (2016). Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Bendigo Art Gallery, Chapter House Lane, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Spinnerei Leipzig, Arndt Artbarn, Tristian Koenig, McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery and Darren Knight Gallery.
In 2021 Kirsty Budge won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. She has undertaken residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as the recipient of an Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio Scholarship (2018), and at the Caselberg Trust on the Otago Peninsula, New Zealand (2019).
Budge has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts, where she was recipient of the 2014 Stirling Collective Award for Painting. Her work is held in the Artbank, Bendigo Art Gallery and City of Port Phillip collections.
Duck down the road, 2024
oil on canvas
165 x 198 cm; 167 x 200.5 x 5 cm framed
“The painting reached in and dredged up the complex, wordless feelings I have whenever I’m reminded of those birth-place islands across the Tasman—a knotting together of love, grief and an attempt to put to one side something that, despite everything, continues to reside deep in my Pākehā selfhood.”
They have developed an allergy to questions, 2024
oil on canvas
42 x 35.5 cm; 44 x 38 x 5 cm framed
“Discreet worlds for these floating selves are contained within these frames, built from fragmented architectures, sink holes, fimbriae, proscenium arches and sky. But there are elements and obsessions that are also on the move. Lines of sight and thought patterns float across and along her canvases. Stay a while and you’ll see that there are acts of enfolding and enclosing as well as openings and unfurlings. ”
