Kushana Bush: Pobblebonk

Kushana Bush, one of Aotearoa’s most celebrated contemporary painters, creates intricate works that weave together centuries of art history to form strange, surreal worlds of her own. Drawing on eighteenth-century Indian miniature painting, Japanese ukiyo-e and Flemish Renaissance art, she borrows, scrambles and reimagines images across cultures and time, transforming familiar traditions into something funny, uncanny and impossible to pin down.

Populated by lugubrious clowns, leering rocks and lolloping amphibians, each painting presents a small but teeming world—like a fever dream that has sprouted leaves. Bush calls them “little terrariums”: sealed microcosms where plants, animals, humans and minerals all breathe gulps of the same uneasy air.