About Sarah
Sarah Ducker’s creative life has evolved through a number of different media, from theatre direction to documentary film-making, before finding its most eloquent expression in photography.
Originally completing her high school studies in London, she returned to Australia to study film and television at UTS and went on to complete a post graduate degree in theatre directing at NIDA.
A visit to the desert near Broken Hill inspired her first exhibition. The photographs captured small moments of life on the ground and the ephemeral beauty of the natural world, a theme that has become the core motif of her work.
After spending some weeks at the Kenneth Myer Artistic Residency in the New Zealand alps, Sarah presented her second exhibition, “Fragility”, that explored the feeling of earths fragility and exquisite beauty.
Her following exhibition, “Gratitude” opened in May 2017 as part of the Head On Festival, where once again, Sarah immersed herself in the fragile abstracted repetitions and expressions of the natural world, this time in sand.
Broken-hearted by the catastrophe of the 2020 bush fires, Sarah travelled into the landscape to photograph “A Testament” that was selected to represent Australia in the International Prix Pictet and was included in the Prix Pictet anthology of images the following year.
Inspired to find the joy in nature once more, “Of Light” was photographed on the Turon River near her beloved Hill End. A meditation on the golden light, danced into existence through the rushing water after the terrifying drought.
Her latest exhibition Ancient Whispers was captured deep along the Hawkesbury river where the ancient, weathered sandstone elicited a quiet reflection on the brevity of our mortality in the face of infinite time.
Last year Sarah traversed Australia desert in a Landcruiser traveling over 18,000 kms. Her exhibition” Wake” curated for Sydney Contemporary, is a distillation of the hundreds of photographs and representative of a number of upcoming exhibitions.
Jean-Pierre Siméon observation that “a poem is where you hear the heartbeat of a stone” is reversed in Sarah’s imagery where visual clarity meets her emotional acuity.