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Kushana Bush may be unsure about life, but her work is that of a deliberate, knowing and methodical hand. Drawing inspiration from Indian miniatures, Japanese woodblocks and, most of all, medieval illuminated manuscripts, her style is a carefully executed tactic to secure our trust and attention.

Bush's aesthetic - with its use of small scale, decorative aspects and stylised figures - permits her often shockingly sexual and gruesome imagery to sneak past our cultural sensitivities. Viewers move closer before they even realise what they're seeing. And once there, they might as well ask: who and what and why? Yet unlike many of today's artists and celebrities, Bush is not out to shock. She seeks new ways of discussing the cliched or contentious. And against the barrage of contemporary imagery and debate, a little artistic sleight of hand is often necessary.

Her figures are densely painted in layers of pencil and gouache on paper and her chosen palette is, as she terms it, 'a device of seduction'. Bush creates a sense of both intimacy and tension, whether depicting a couple in supplication or a pile of broken, intertwined bodies. Her subjects cluster in what could be either post-carnal bliss or apathetic boredom, as in her 2007 'Slump Series', or in collective prayer or empty ritual in 'The Revival' series of the following year. Not wanting to be labeled a traditional miniaturist, Bush gives these longstanding techniques a contemporary home. Her figures float in largely barren, flat, white landscapes, on paper almost a metre in height. The space they inhabit suggests more a psychological than a literal one, an effect perhaps partially infused by Bush's own geographical distance as an artist living and working in New Zealand's southern city of Dunedin.

Despite their almost aerial aspect, there is a sense of the interior - even the domestic - about these artworks, and the accompanying implication of voyeurism is unsettling. Against this blankness, accented areas are brought into focus. True to form, Bush deftly employs this lack of context as a tool, creating a fetishistic microcosm. When coupled with expanses of space, simple touches treated with detailed attention are invested with greater meaning: a patch of welts or a tuft of pubic hair is perhaps evidence of depravity; a bracelet or patterned shawl makes us ask questions about identity. We know these figures are dysfunctional in some way, although we're not quite sure how. And although they make us squirm, they also engender a little bit of curiosity, perhaps even pathos and sometimes, yes, a smile. Bush isn't convincingly coming from a solely earnest platform, and again her black humour is a savvy method of facilitating engagement with ideas that are either culturally taboo or overused...

The artist's approach enables beauty to sit side by side with revulsion. Bush's paper world - like the one the artist sees around her - is full of dichotomies; love and fear, savagery and tenderness, faith and resignation. 'When I make a body of work, I think about it as a kind of a country - a society of people in a particular time - and this allows me the luxury of playing god. It gives me the possibility to create unrealistic solutions to real life concerns'...

 This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2009 issue.