A studio visit with Kirsty Budge

Ahead of our online exhibition with Kirsty titled 'Sunnyside' we were excited to visit her studio in Djaara Country/Castlemaine, Australia and ask her a few questions about her fascinating practice.
CLG: Looking at your paintings the negative space seems compositionally integral. Could you tell us a little more about the technical process by which you make your paintings?

KB: In many ways I’m more drawn to the space between and around forms rather than the forms themselves. These areas are often former positives turned negative through layers, textures, shadow and accumulated history. Structurally, that tension between presence and absence might actually be one of the primary drivers within the paintings for me, almost like set pieces being wheeled in and out of the frame to support or destabilise the perception around the main attraction.

I usually begin the underpainting in a very loose way, and my only real objective at that stage is to create a variance between opaque and transparent forms so things don’t become too one-note and there’s room for the painting to breathe. At that point I’m working in a purposely detached way, allowing forms to emerge gradually through association, observation, pareidolia, and chance encounters between shifting tones. The underpaintings are predominantly red and orange to denote life and a tangible shifting of time peeking through (think blood, sunsets, sunrise).
Sometimes the background layers become far more textured and complex than a popping foreground player and in a certain light or from particular angles an embossed effect begins to emerge and the pieces start to lift, shift, vibrate or crack open into something other. When that third thing emerges, everything is flipped on its head, perspective shifts and narrative fragments start to permeate and the work starts to teach me something rather than the other way around.

The paintings then often move through many unstable states over time before a resolution, and I’m interested in preserving traces of those earlier conditions rather than fully covering them over. In that sense, the process feels closer to restoration and archeology but also some kind of world building and creation of dynamics within the frame, both the seen and the unseen, which are valuable to me.
CLG: You mention both Rita Angus, Janet Frame and Albert Camus as influences. Could you speak more broadly about the artists and writers who have influenced your practice and this body of work in particular.

KB: In general I gravitate towards artists, musicians and writers who create psychologically charged worlds through atmosphere, framing and perception rather than straightforward narrative. Rita Angus has been very important to me for a long time, particularly the earthy undertones, stillness and metaphysical clarity within her paintings, and the way landscape, architecture and interior states seem to mirror one another. There’s something psychologically contained yet expansive in her work that I connect with deeply as a New Zealand-born painter living abroad.

Janet Frame has also been a huge influence over the years, not only through her fiction but also her poetry and autobiographical writing. I’m interested in the way ordinary spaces in her work can suddenly become psychologically charged or slip into an atmosphere of magical realism, where thought and experience merge and expand. Her relationship to New Zealand, exile, estrangement, recognition and reflection has helped shape my own understanding of those conditions.

Albert Camus’ collection of editorial letters for the resistance journal Combat (Camus at Combat 1944–47) has also been hugely informative over the past eighteen months. During that period he wrote with a sense of anger, moral frustration and urgency around revolution, resistance and political responsibility without collapsing into despair, while concurrently working on novels and play adaptations. That balance between political consciousness and embodied everyday life has stayed with me.
What has also been interesting over the years is that it’s almost impossible to read writers like Camus, Susan Sontag or Chris Kraus without eventually being led toward the life and work of Simone Weil. Weil has deeply informed my thinking, particularly her ideas around attention, contemplation and Metaxu, mediating or threshold structures that both separate and connect. I think a lot of my work exists within those in-between conditions psychologically, spatially and atmospherically. I recently read A Life in Letters, a collection of Weil’s correspondence with her parents and brother, which offered such an intimate insight into humility, self-directed learning and the emotional consequences of one’s convictions. I think I’m increasingly drawn to collections of letters and correspondence because they offer this privileged access to private communication, personal thought and voice.

Conceptually I’ve also been thinking through writers and theorists such as Mark Fisher and Julia Kristeva, particularly ideas around hauntology and background culture, the carnivalesque, the abject, immanence and psychic architecture.

In terms of painters, I’m always returning to Paula Rego, Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico, who all retained an incredible freedom and fluidity across style, mood and subject matter throughout their life’s work. I like following leads when they unexpectedly appear. Recently I was reading an essay on Paula Rego by Germaine Greer from a 1991 National Gallery exhibition catalogue in London. The essay was discussing framing, tension and Goya, and I then needed to know about what Greer was doing now. I discovered she currently lives only a five-minute walk from me in an aged care facility in Castlemaine. I handwrote a card and walked it to reception and told an employee that here is a tiny card for Germaine Greer. Now I'll try not to interpret the glazed look in the eye of the receiver when I said this but I was told that she’d make sure it reached her. I haven’t received a reply and don’t expect one, but one does never know.
CLG: We see so much pathos in your work but also humour! Could you perhaps expand upon the role of humour in your practice?

KB: I think humour can open up psychological space very quickly. I sometimes feel like a sense of humour is almost a seventh sense beyond the sixth, and it’s fundamentally different for everyone.

I’m interested in forms of humour that sit quite close beside melancholy, discomfort, theatricality or existential tension, where something can feel absurd and emotionally sincere simultaneously. A lot of the humour emerges through language, bodily exaggeration, strange symbolic collisions, or figures that seem slightly trapped within their own performances.

When I’m naming works, I tend to think about them almost like television episodes, songs or chapters in a book. I’m drawn to carnivalesque forms of humour where high and low registers collapse into one another such as philosophy beside cartoon logic, mysticism next to workplace satire, or family dynamics merging into corporate industry.

For me, humour has a structural relationship to connection and vulnerability. It keeps the work psychologically open and allows tension, ambiguity and contradiction to remain active within it rather than resolving too neatly.
CLG: In this particular body of work and its title there is a tongue in cheek allusion to toxic positivity and the wellness culture perpetuated by social media. Could you perhaps expand upon this and the way contemporary culture permeates your work in general?

KB: The term Sunnyside has stayed with me since childhood because it sounds reassuringly optimistic while also carrying stranger and darker undercurrents beneath the surface. It always felt like a forced smile, an eerie optimism, or a flattening of emotional nuance hidden beneath the language of institutional care.

I think contemporary culture enters the paintings less through direct critique and more through atmosphere, fragmentation and psychic texture. Social media, advertising language and wellness culture can produce a kind of curated emotional performance that I find both fascinating and uncanny. There’s often pressure toward coherence, positivity and self-construction that can feel strangely disembodied or emotionally dissonant.

The paintings resist that kind of seamlessness because I’m more interested in contradiction, symbolic leakage and associative forms of logic where fragments, moods and emotional registers can collide and remain unresolved.
Visit the exhibition page

Exhibitions
Kirsty Budge 'Sunnyside'
Online 18 May - 1 July 2026
An online exhibition of works on canvas by Kirsty Budge (NZ) titled 'Sunnyside' Emerging from an intuitive process shaped by dream analysis, memory and observation, Budge's practice examines the thresholds...
Studio photography by Simoen van der Meent