Immersive experiences in landscape are at the core of Ross Booker’s artistic practice. His time in the studio is sustained by regular field trips into arid Australia’s rocky heart, coastal wetlands, and local environs.
Booker focuses on the structure and form of these localities, studying topography, geography and geology, and the history of its evolution over deep time. His observations of waterways focus on the ephemeral and mutable qualities of river systems, sandflats and claypans and the mercurial qualities of the sea. He also explores correlations between macro and microcosms inherent in his surroundings.
Booker is preoccupied by notions of change 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.
His most recent work uses digital imagery, painting, and drawing as the artwork substrate. These impressions of the natural world are overlaid by a delicate drawing on clear Perspex.
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 northern NSW, studied at the Queensland College of Art, and currently lives and practices full-time in Brisbane. He started exhibiting regularly in the early 1990s.
