Emerging from an intuitive process shaped by dream analysis, memory and observation, Budge's practice examines the thresholds between psychological and material space, a land where melancholy and carnivalesque absurdity coexist.
While staying in a small apartment in an old mansion in Crown Heights, Brooklyn Kirsty Budge was drawn to the word ‘Sunnyside’ engraved on an external wall. It struck a cord with her as ‘Sunnyside’ is coincidentally the name of a former mental asylum in Christchurch, NZ that notoriously housed the painter Rita Angus and writer Janet Frame, both of whom have influenced Budge since her childhood. Finally, she found herself making this new body of work while reading about Albert Camus during his time in New York – it mentioned that one of his favourite things to do was to read the latest copy of Sunnyside, an undertaker’s journal.
Sometimes a word becomes the inevitable shell for the body of work it houses. To have a ‘sunnyside’, implies an underbelly that is the inverse. The irony of its usage in connection with a mental asylum reflects the same gallows humour and tragic optimism that perhaps also attracted Camus. More broadly the word itself contains many of the contradictions and complexities that permeate Budge’s own work. Paintings she describes as ‘psychological containers where private thought and collective culture intersect’, generating compositions that feel intimate, uncanny and spectral.
Technically Budge’s paintings are as much about the removal of paint as they are about its application, a process Budge sees as akin to a form of psychic and material archaeology. The work explores the porous relationships between inner and external worlds through a fluid interplay of figuration and abstraction. Emerging from an intuitive process shaped by dream analysis, memory and observation, her practice examines the thresholds between psychological and material space, a land where melancholy and carnivalesque absurdity coexist.
Sunnyside unfolds as a series of stolen psychological vignettes, a window into the artist’s thoughts and an invitation to explore our own. The works share a fantastical yet cohesive visual language that Budge has forged and perfected over time. To quote Janet Frame who so inspired Budge’s practice. “Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. ”
