Kirsty Budge’s paintings explore 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, observation and shifting environments, her works examine thresholds between psychological and material space, where humour, melancholy and carnivalesque absurdity coexist.
Working through continual layering, excavation and re-inscription, Budge treats painting as a form of psychic and material archaeology. In her process, the removal of paint is as significant as its application, and negative space becomes as vital as positive form. Images that appear immediate are often exposed remnants of earlier states buried beneath the surface, creating the sensation of painting behind the forefront. Through this accumulation and erosion, the paintings develop as non-linear spaces shaped by symbolic association, pareidolia, dream logic, hauntological traces and experiential residue.
Recent works have been produced between New York, Melbourne, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Blue Mountains and Castlemaine, drawing on ritualistic walking practices, synchronistic moments and the immanence of everyday life. Influenced by cinematic framing, metaphoric resonances, the colour logic of nature and architectural debris encountered in transit, Budge’s paintings operate as psychological containers where private thought and collective culture intersect, generating spaces that feel intimate, uncanny and spectral.
Bio
Kirsty Budge (b.1981 Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand) lives and works in Djaara Country/Castlemaine, Australia. She has a BFA in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia graduating in 2014.
Recent solo exhibitions include Sunnyside (Cooke Latham, London, 2026), Bridge and Tunnel (Daine Singer, 2025), Buried in Bits (NADA, New York, 2024), Brown Mirror, Paintings from Behind, (Daine Singer, 2024), (I’ve got) half a mind (Daine Singer, 2022), If you’re gonna spew, spew into this (Daine Singer, 2020), The Doing (Daine Singer, 2019), Gawkalitis (Daine Singer, 2017), The Painters are In (Spring 1883, 2016), and I’m not desperate, you’re desperate (Sarah Scout Presents, 2016).
Selected Group exhibitions include Minor Attractions (London 2024), How to Swim (Edwina Corlette, Brisbane, 2024), Melbourne Art Fair (Daine Singer 2020, 2022, 2024), Killing Time, (Chapter House Lane, Melbourne 2018); VCA 150 alumni (Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 2017), Painting. More Painting (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2016), Spinnerei (Leipzig, Germany, 2016).
In 2021 Kirsty Budge won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize from Bendigo Art Gallery. 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).
Her work is held in the Artbank, Bendigo Art Gallery and City of Port Phillip collections as well as private collections across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.
Studio portrait courtesy of Simoen van der Meent