Njookenbooroo (Herdsman Lake) - Red Wattlebird, Australian White Ibis, Purple Swamphen VII

Scott Price is an Australian artist working on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar. He is interested in the interconnections of humans and nature, and non-human entanglement. Scott works across multiple mediums including painting, watercolour, drawing, print-making, video, sound and installation.

Njookenbooroo (Herdsman Lake) was made through an embedded practice in the Herdsman Lake wetlands of Western Australia, north of Boorloo/Perth. The work eschews representation and the imposition of meaning or perspectives on the landscape. It is made not as a representation of the wetlands or as a sense of place in response to Herdsman Lake, but as a co-responsible production with the environment itself, not simply as the artist’s response to the land but as a correspondence with the land.

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I am an artist based in Perth/Boorloo, Western Australia, working in a site-responsive landscape practice that explores the intersection of site, land, place and people within a post-Colonial Australian imaginary. In 2022 I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Curtin University, and an Honours (First Class) in 2024.

Throughout this time I have developed a methodology for an alternative landscape painting rooted in embedded making and indexical mark making techniques. Embedded making entails spending extended periods of time within the environment, making work within the land itself through observational drawing, impressionistic watercolour painting and journalistic reflection. Indexical mark making is a way of working that seeks to include nature and land as an active participant in the production of the artwork by allowing nature to create its own marks on the paper by using found ochres, nature printing, or dragging large pieces of paper through the environment, along the dirt ground or against burnt trees and mallees. In doing so, the work records movement through and within the land, capturing the collaborative interactions between nature and myself as an artist, and allowing the unique physical character of the landscape to express itself through the artwork.