Ruth Watson (artist)

Ruth Watson (born 1962) is a New Zealand artist and a lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. She works in photography, sculpture, painting and installation art.

Watson was born in Canterbury, New Zealand. She studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1984. She began exhibiting in the mid-1980s and participated in the 9th Sydney Biennale exhibition The Boundary Rider in 1992. In 1992, she was awarded the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Award. In 1994, Watson was awarded an Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship, and she travelled to Germany as artist in residence at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

In 1995 Watson moved to Australia. While living here, she completed a Masters in Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts and a PhD at the Australian National University. Her work was included in the Australian exhibition, Living Here Now: Art and Politics, 1999. She has held solo exhibitions at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Big Wall (2011), Unnerved: The New Zealand Project Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2010) and Better Places at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2008). She has also held solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe: Paradise Now, Asia Society Museum, New York, 2004 and The World Over, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1996. In 2005 she won the international Walter W. Ristow Prize for an essay on the history of cartography, one of her particular interest areas. The same year, she collaborated with the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and created the largest map of the universe known to date.

In the summer of 2010-2011, Watson travelled to Antarctica as part of a science-based course run by Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury. She subsequently produced artworks based on her experiences.