DR Kyla McFarlane
Brown Mirror: Paintings from Behind
Catalogue Essay
I remember the moment I felt like I’d really seen a Kirsty Budge painting. A large work was leaning against the wall of the office of Daine Singer Gallery, just out of my line of sight. Something unspoken caused me to turn and look, and that act of looking had an uncanny effect. The only way I can describe this encounter is that I felt like I was being apprehended by this painting, as if it was returning my gaze. It had ensnared me, and was luring me in. There was something about the acid greens and deep, volcanic browns and the curling, canopied mise en scène that puts me in mind of certain landscapes in my home country, Aotearoa New Zealand. Bushland touched by bright sun, casting the darkest of shadows. Beaches with black sand, long-beaked tūī in the trees. 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.
This brief encounter with Kirsty’s painting led to further encounters with Kirsty herself at her home studio, surrounded by her paintings in various stages of coming-into-being. These stages begin with the laying down of the cadmium red-brown-orange ground, and evolve into a series of additions-and-subtractions—comings-and-goings of colour and form that are considered and reconsidered over time during her lengthy painting process. Building up and scraping back is Kirsty’s modus-operandi, that is how form and meaning is made here. The history of this process of discovery is often discernible in the texture of the final work, traces of her time spent figuring the whole thing out, in paint.
When Kirsty talks about her paintings, it is often with an air of surprise. As if she, too, has been caught unawares, and is delighted by the revelations and suggestions offered forth by the painting as she works on it.
This is, I think, a beautiful configuration of the limits of intention. As Kirsty is led by the painting, there is an intuitive giving over that is enacted. This giving over then leads to expression; it allows things to be found and acknowledged.
‘Coming-into-being’ is my pretentious way of saying that the paintings I saw at her home studio were works in progress. However, it occurs to me that this is something we might also say of ourselves, as ever-evolving subjects-in-formation moving through our lives as best we can. And it might also go some way to describing the open vulnerability Kirsty brings to her practice, and to the way these paintings continue to exist in the world—even when they leave her care as completed works of art. The blend and stretch of Kirsty’s paintings is both generative and generous. While they emerge from introspection, and long hours spent between artist and canvas, they are also in conversation with the world, and with you and me as individuals in commune with the work. There is a carving out of space being enacted here, both inside the frame and beyond it. Space that Kirsty has made for us all to spend time in.
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So now we are all invited to meet Kirsty’s latest suite of paintings, which are brought together under the exhibition title Brown Mirror: Paintings from Behind. Typically, this title articulates a duality that is always to be found in Kirsty’s work, the advancing and retreating that self-examination and observation of the world outside in all its fucked-up complexity entails. The brown mirror in question, the Yarra River, bends close to Kirsty’s home and she spends time running along its banks. She sees its murky surface, its muddied reflections, and seeks to go deeper. As we spend time with these works, we might observe a community of selves emerging. Little Janus-faced and mirrored selves. Selves encased in glassy bubbles, selves emerging from the ground. Shadow selves behind slatted blinds. Selves that reach out with their arms across the canvas—in, down and around. Resting selves. Sculptural selves. Buried selves and exulted selves.
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. That’s the duality of her practice speaking to us, again. There are also deep wells of meaning to sink into here, if you care to, with Kirsty’s eclectic, bower-birdy titles on hand to accompany you. Kirsty teases and puns with her titles, riffing off Apple’s prissy censoring of fuck to duck in our text messages in Duck down the road to coining the perfect absurdity in The water looks thirsty. In While your (sic) down there, Kirsty entertains herself with a judge-y innuendo. It’s hilarious and sharp, sharp enough to pierce a delicate skin, or fragile male ego. (The history of painting may be replete with male geniuses, but do they have the same grammar chops?) Proud mother of none asserts a place in the world, while Pea leads our eye and imagination to princesses and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, depending on your point of view …
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Whenever Kirsty and I converse, we end up on wild tangents. We should really get to the point already! Yet the more we follow those tangents, the more I feel I am coming to understand her work. The tangents are the point. (Or, to quote one of Kirsty’s titles, the point being is that the tangents are the point.) The tangents are philosophical and trite, high-and-low cultured, nostalgic, stupid, funny, despairing and sad. They are frustrated, psychological, feminist, art historical, childless and well-read. The tangents fill the room and are folded into and lie behind the canvases, embedding themselves there.
As it turns out, Kirsty also grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has investigated her relationship to this in her life and in her work. Perhaps that’s why she gut-punched me so effortlessly with that painting leaning against the wall in the gallery office. And why I so readily employed magical thinking to that encounter, imbuing the painting with its own agency, its own eyes. And why we drink Pukka tea amongst the paintings coming-into-being, and discuss our favourite Tom Sainsbury posts on Instagram. In several of his posts, Sainsbury is mining a childhood that mirrors aspects of our own. There’s comfort in his cultural references, which speak to our own histories and milieus. Magic Eyes, the Forty Hour Famine, Twisties, sugar on Weetbix and Raro, it’s all there. We also see shade in his light observations, the bullies and the small irritations that are amplified in small places. The theatre kid from a small, small town. Difference. The feeling of being out-of-place.
Acid green leaves on dark volcanic soil.
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These are our shared obsessions and origins, but you will bring your own to Brown River. The paintings are waiting, open-armed. They’ll happily lay their eyes on you.
– Kyla McFarlane, March 2024