Ross Booker — Bio
Immersive experiences in landscape are at the core of Ross Booker’s practice. Time in the studio is sustained by field trips and research-based writing.
His most recent series look at watery landscapes, using digital media, video, text, painting, and drawing.
Booker’s observations of waterways focus on the ephemeral qualities of water. His work addresses concepts of transformation evident in the physical world, and the equilibrium that underpins its stability and its impermanence, giving rise to the transitory nature of our own existence.
“Water is at the genesis of my artistic practice. It is both my muse and my sage. We are all bodies of water, continually dissolving into other bodies of water. This transmutation of H2O both ‘into’ and ‘out of’ our anatomy forms a profound fluid belonging to the planet.”
In his ongoing series of work, The Water Diaries, the fluid motion of water is stilled by the camera lens and overlaid with the written word.
“My use of text arises from an internal dialogue I have with water. What would water say if it had the agency of a voice? What memory and stories does it hold? How can it help me empathise with the more-than-human world in ways outside my own human perspective?
Water embodies connection and reciprocity. Both an acknowledgement of the water I come from and a responsibility to the water I pass on.”
Ross Booker obtained Honorary Mention in the Winton Outback Art Prize in 2020, the People’s Choice Award in the Sunshine Coast Art Prize in 2012 and has been a finalist in the Redland Art Award, the Alice Springs Art Prize, and the Broken Hill Outback Open. He is the subject of a 2013 monograph about central Australia titled Out from Alice — painting and drawing in central Australia (ArtHives, Brisbane).
Booker was born in Lismore and grew up in Surfers Paradise. He studied at the Queensland College of Art and currently lives and practices full-time in Brisbane. He started exhibiting regularly in the early 1990s and is represented by Onespace Gallery.