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 Dunedin-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 New Zealand’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.