Kirstie Ussher is an emerging New Zealand-born visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She creates layered, tactile paintings that develop gradually through repetition and reworking. Her practice is intuitive and material-led, with a focus on surface, colour and subtle shifts that happen over time. Rather than aiming for perfection, she allows each piece to evolve through an organic, responsive process.

Kirstie’s practice is explorative, process-driven, and intuitive. Working with oil paint, cold wax, sand, fabric, and other textured materials, she allows the surfaces to guide the evolution of each painting. Layering, scraping, sanding, and reworking, she responds to the emerging textures and interactions of colour and material.

Her work explores the playful resonance of texture and form, finding joy in the subtleties of surface, tone, and the relationships between layers. Pieces develop through curiosity and engagement with the materials, resulting in works that are tactile and expressive.

Patience in the process is key - building, subtracting, softening, and shifting until each painting finds its own resolution, reflecting both the physicality of the medium and the intuitive responses it evokes.