Kushana Bush: Pobblebonk

A pobblebonk is a type of frog known for its strange, distinctive call, which sounds like the ‘bonk’ of a banjo string being pulled. Though it belongs entirely to the natural world, it feels somehow too weird to be real, carrying the peculiar sensation of something only imagined.

That same sense of nature rendered uncanny runs through the recent work of Ōtepoti -based artist Kushana Bush. 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.

Bush is one of Aotearoa’s most celebrated and distinctive contemporary painters, known for extraordinarily intricate works that collapse centuries of art history into worlds entirely her own. Taking inspiration from the visual languages of eighteenth-century Indian miniature painting, Japanese ukiyo-e prints and Flemish Renaissance painting, she borrows, scrambles and reimagines images across cultures and time. Like a delightfully misheard lyric, these inherited visual traditions slip loose from their original meanings, becoming something surreal, funny, faintly unhinged and impossible to pin down.

In Pobblebonk, that long-standing fascination with strange and unstable worlds takes a new turn. Many of these paintings emerged alongside Bush’s experience of becoming a first-time mother—a profound shift that altered not only the rhythms of her life and studio, but the way the familiar world appeared to her. As Bush’s work ventures outdoors for the first time, her distinctive gaze turns towards the natural world, revealing the latent weirdness that was there all along. Mother Earth herself, it seems, has painted on clown makeup.

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Kushana Bush (b. 1983) lives and works in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Among her major awards and residencies are the University of Otago’s Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 2011 and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award in 2013. Her major solo exhibition and publication The Burning Hours, developed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery, toured throughout Aotearoa New Zealand in 2016–17.

In 2026, Bush’s work is included in Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her work is held in major public collections across Aotearoa and Australia, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū and Dunedin Public Art Gallery — and, soon, The Dowse Art Museum.

^{Kushana Bush, This Sacrifice (detail), 2021.  Gouache, metallic paint and watercolour on paper. Private collection, Sydney.}