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 looks at watery landscapes, using digital media, video, text, painting, and drawing.
Booker’s observations of waterways focus on the ephemeral and mutable 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 lifelong 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.
The mercurial nature of water embodies the ungraspable shape of existence. It is both phenomenological and eternal – never still, always evolving through constant change.”
In his latest series, The Water Diaries, the undulating surface of water is stilled by the camera lens and overlaid with the written word.
“My use of text arises from the perpetual subconscious dialogue occurring between the water outside my body and the water within. What memory, story and lessons does water hold?”
Ross Booker won the Cathedral of Saint Stephens Art Prize in 2014, 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.