Dunedin artist reveals a terrifying lightness

Rotation Prayer (detail), by Kushana Bush.

It's surprising that Kushana Bush will open her first major solo exhibition in Dunedin tomorrow.

The 25-year-old Otago Polytechnic School of Art painting lecturer is considered one of New Zealand's most promising young painters, but has kept a low profile in her home town.

And that's just the way she likes it.

"I like to sit back and not be the main event. My work lets me explore things that I wouldn't otherwise," she says.

"I like to blend into the background, while the work plays with all kinds of bad manners. I get away with things on paper that I wouldn't get away with in real life.

"I like to paint hyperbolic versions of what I'm experiencing or what I see other people experiencing and take it to its breaking point.

"Basically, the work flirts with the promise of obtaining truth or meaning in life, and the conflict occurs when my characters and I realise truth just isn't possible. I hope that's what makes it [her art] both challenging and accessible to people," she says.

"It has things that people are looking for, but [they] are also a bit frightened of it."

Bush has embraced a painting medium dating back to the 14th century to create her latest works.

"Gouache is my preferred medium. It's a very fluid drawing medium, lending itself to detail," she says.

"It has substance and doesn't come off as synthetic. It also doesn't have so much baggage as other paint types can have.

"I really like the tension you get with it, too. If you make a mistake it's very hard to undo it. There's no erasure.

"With oil and acrylic you're working against a kind of glue. Whereas, gouache is just pigment mixed with gum arabic and chalk.

"It's paint at its purest and you need water to activate it. Then you pool it on to the paper and let it rest. You're not pushing it around like other paints," Bush says.

"Gouache is very immediate, only taking as long as the water takes to dry.

For this series I mixed about 30 jars of different skin colours. I couldn't come up with names for them all, so I had to just number them," she says.

"The only drawback with gouache is it's very delicate and can disappear with a wet sneeze if it isn't fixed or protected under glass.

"It's a very tense, concentrated process, because you can't make mistakes and, as a viewer, it is tense too, because you could easily damage them.

"That's another one of the things I enjoy about the medium. It makes it more precious."

Bush's latest exhibition bridges her 2007 exhibition, "Slump Series", in which she examined apathy through a society of disenfranchised figures existing in a death-in-life vacuum.

"The Revival" moves on from that condition, establishing a community of meditating people seeking guidance in a medieval realm.