Sandra Bushby

“I feel very honoured to be showing as part of a continuing thread of exceptional woman artists at mothermother. Jessica Douglas, my friend and colleague from my undergraduate days at Elam art school introduced me to the project and I’m showing with Layla Rudneva-Mackay. Nat, Layla and I hung the show last Friday. We decided together how to best hang the work. Alongside these activities of; hanging, deciding and measuring, we intermittently paused to discuss the unique context of the mothermother gallery; how it operates now and how it might possibly continue to extend for future connections and projects. 

My painting practice’s main operation aims to resist foreclosure. 

As a strategy to generate infinite pictorial operations, I begin by writing a poem’s title or a poem’s line. Writing transforms into drawing and the letters and words are embedded with painting materiality and aim to enhance yet disrupt pictorial spatial conventions, figure ground plays and painterly effects. Words and letters, dashes and lines sourced from the poems become data to generate new works and then feedback into a pool to open and generate new works. The initial series of drawings act as the underlining pattern to begin an emergent painting process in a constant paint and feedback loop, hence these first drawings are upcycled endlessly into the painting materiality.

The poems referenced in this show are from the book ‘The Sea Garden’ by H.D. Hilda Doolittle. written in 1917, modernist poetic structure including vivid word colours and delineated shapes metaphorically explore themes of war, loss, and self-discovery.”

Sandra Bushby x mothermother 2020

Sandra Bushby is currently a doc fa candidate at Elam fine art school. her thesis title: ‘resisting foreclosure’ is from thoughts of painting as a space for reflection, for turning things over with consideration for opening up strange clouds of feeling within the presuming. The paintings emerge from the tension between intervals and unfolding pictorial space in this way every interaction of the picture surface is active. Reading poetry and referencing poems’ visual structures and forms while thinking about the phenomenological ways of listening to the world and recognizing the world as always retaining initiative is at the core of this painting practice. Sandra works as if painting is a special way of marking time; of letting time take incremental and intermittent form; of letting time show itself through its crumbled edges and atmospheric patching; of showing the inadvertency of painting’s time.

Sandra has recently shown her work at: Window, Two Rooms Gallery, George Fraser Gallery, Elam Project Space, and her work is held at the Te Papa and Auckland Museum Collections.

Sandra Bushby is represented by Sumer Contemporary Art