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Anastasia Booth teases arts erotic potential as fragmented or flawed substitute. By interleaving the languages of Freudian fetishism, kink, dark fantasy, feminism, history and personal anecdote, she ponders, can the artist as an agentive and deviant subject fight off gendered limitations and her own sexual failures. The dialogues she dabbles in can be problematic and contradictory, where no real answer is forthcoming. |
Sometimes, fetish strategies of partialism, mimicry and projection are used with subversive intent - acting to pry apart historic formulas - but more often than not, the artworks emerge from poetic mishap. Leather, glass, lustrous metals, sex toys, latex, timber, hair and lube inspire minimalist and elegant forms that derive from the slap-dash ontology of suburban kink sites. Situated in a liminal zone these works engage with the imitative fragment and confuse it with the veritable subject. A trace of material recalling the erotic despite any prior purpose, the benign surface enacting pleasure and moral consequence. As props for an illusory narrative, they become the site of psychological projection, our interaction inherently phantasmic. Interestingly, the simulation can fail when the objects are unable to sustain the desires being forcibly grafted onto them. There is great potential in this, the slippage of the personal ideal as arousal becomes absurd and impotent, queering femme desire by opening it up to fluid discourses not located in a binary. Anastasia lives and works in Brisbane, Australia. She refined her craft at the Queensland University of Technology, completing her Practice-led Honours and Doctoral study. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including projects at The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Institute of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Queensland Museum, Griffith University Art Museum, Milani Gallery CARPARK, Screen Space, The Australian Experimental Art Foundation and was artist in residence at Outer Space. She also designs and delivers workshops, as well as public programs in museums and galleries. |
A man that didn't have betrayal in his heart | 2025 | Metro Arts Gallery 2, Brisbane
A man that didn’t have betrayal in his heart amasses newly developed sculptural assemblage and brings it forward into the gallery for display and critical examination. Harkening back to a younger me, these works reconstruct engagements in erotic scenario. Capricious and foolish longing, kink gone awry and where the toil of sensuality – its unpronounced labour – is a submission to melancholy. Instead of using erotic abstraction to reclaim intimacy, these sculptures revel in the makers floundering inadequacy (anxious and self-aware). Drawing from minimalism, love hotel interiors, industrial materials, kink environments, classical statuary, ball gags, medieval torture devices, fetishism and diaristic modes of confession. Such an amalgamation of stimuli manifests into a paracosm – an internal topology of the desiring self. A decidedly strange BDSM realm of liminality, fluidity and ambiguity built on the legacy of American and Australian post-fetish sculpture and installation practice. One that contemporises sub-cultural methods, to advocate for erotic appetites that are unsure, despondent and in flux. Sculptural tableau is poetic simulation, denoting: scene, body, apparatus, arousal and the dissolution of the self after orgasm.
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Text | Studio
Support Partners | Metro Arts in partnership with
Brisbane City Council, Arts Queensland and the MAVA substation
Exhibition documentation | Anastasia Booth and Courtney Pedersen
Support Partners | Metro Arts in partnership with
Brisbane City Council, Arts Queensland and the MAVA substation
Exhibition documentation | Anastasia Booth and Courtney Pedersen
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Summer Residency Showcase, Tracking a Lineage (Freud): A collaboration with John Booth | 2020 | Outer Space, Brisbane 
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Tracking a Lineage was an archival installation that brought together a range of Anastasia's leather costumes and the paraphernalia from their father’s research-based analysis of ancient Greek pottery. Created in Queensland in the 80’s using native Australian clays and appropriated ancient techniques, his work sought to correct errors in purely theoretical investigations by implementing Archaeology in Action practices, to better illustrate the construction of Red-Figure pottery. When visiting museums in Greece and London for personal research into Sigmund Freud's antiquities collection (including, his Greek cremation urn that was destroyed by vandals), the artist observed that their father’s hybrid pots were a 1:1 recreation of prized ancient remnants. An awareness forming an appreciation for his expertise and a reconsideration of the foundational methods, which built them as a contemporary artist. Yet, this childhood history also creates tension, as it plays into the more absurd and contested fragments of Freud's theories that conflate the biological father with the patriarchal father and the kink honorific daddy.
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Exhibiting artists | Tony Albert, Hany Armanious, Gordon Bennett, Krista Berga, Anastasia Booth, Juan Davila, Karla Dickens, Chantal Fraser, Karl Fritsch and Francis Upritchard, Ian Haig, Louise Hearman, Gordon Hookey, Natalya Hughes, Emily Hunt, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Robert Pulie, Dieter Roth, Carolee Schneemann, Tim Schultz, Tyza Stewart, Sophie Takach, Wart, Jemima Wyman, Paul Yore
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The Unreachable in Intimate Immensity curated by Amy-Clare McCarthy and Katherine Dionysius | 2019 | Outer Space, Brisbane 
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Instead of being an index for a heroic historical event or functioning as a cultural mnemonic apparatus, the artist mythologises personal history and creates 'misery monuments' to honour and immortalise failings. Adopting the formal apparatus of the star chart and data visualisation from comet orbits, to contest saviour tropes in tragedy. Orbit typings ironically depict intimate interaction and victim commentary [ hyperbolic orbit - "they are so fast, the comet will be ejected from the solar system and never return". ] - escape velocity.
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Exhibiting artists | Ali Bezer, Anastasia Booth, Sundari Carmody, Kinly Grey, Jenna Lee, Lisa Sammut
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Teresa (2016-2018) in Ecstacy: Baroque and Beyond curated by Andrea Bubenik | 2017 | The University of Queensland Art Museum Brisbane 
Exhibiting Artists | Pietro Aquila, Chris Bennie, Anastasia Booth, Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dali, Audrey Flack, Bill Henson, Petrina Hicks, William Hogarth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Claude Mellan, Nigel Milsom, Girolamo Nerli, Gordon Shepherdson, David Stephenson, Hiromi Tango, David Wadelton
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Teresa is a reconstruction of the brass aureole from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Divorced from the stricture of the sepulchral colonnade, the simulation of divine rays unfurl as levitating silhouette. Formally abstracting Teresa in this manner criticises the reductionist gaze of the inquisition, explicating her role as co-opted transmitter for the divine. Coppers crystalline structure and intrinsic affinity for thermal energy denote her operations as a converter. Considering, how Teresa's external practices of transcribing faith as erotic gesture - as evidenced in her writing - coalesced into ideology. In its construction, the arduous ritual of hand abrading copper - frottage - sits within contemporary conceptions of artistic process as agentive inscription, with the artist acting as proxy by reconceptualizing corporal mortification. Such toils embody a cross-history dialogue between practitioner and saint.
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Anasyrma @ Netherworlds curated by Amy-Clare McCarthy & Kieran Swann | 2018 | Spring Hill Reservoir Brisbane, supported by Arts Queensland
Exhibiting artists | Naomi Blacklock, Anastasia Booth, Caitlin Franzman, Chantal Fraser, Clay Kerrigan, Blake Lawrence
Exhibition documentation | Dom Krupinski and Louis Lim
Exhibition documentation | Dom Krupinski and Louis Lim
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Common Scold collaborative exhibition with Naomi Blacklock, curated by Amy-Clare McCarthy & Kieran Swann | 2018 | Bus Projects, Melbourne 
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In the common law of crime in England and Wales of the 1500s (and as recently as the 1960s), women deemed to be ‘quarrelsome’ were secured in iron muzzles, or bridles, which inhibited the tongue. Considered a preventative measure implemented for centuries to punish, humiliate, and silence individuals accused of gossiping, inciting riots, and witchcraft. Women were forced to wear these in public and led through the town in parodic displays of festivity. Here combining their sonic and installation practices, artists Naomi Blacklock and Anastasia Booth draw on shared investigations into feminine bodies, the archetype of the witch, and the history of these devices. Utilising ritual, gesture, and apotropaic materials to consider the possibilities of agency and rebellion when the tongue has been silenced.
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Collaborative Performance Anastasia Booth and Naomi Blacklock produced by people+artist+place. Star-Crossed Rivers was a performance outcome from a one-day collaborative intensive with year 10 theatre students from Brisbane State High School | 2018 | South Bank, Brisbane, supported by Arts Queensland 
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Contemporary artists, Naomi Blacklock and Anastasia Booth worked with year 10 students from Brisbane State High School to perform a contemporary retelling of the famous Punjab love story Sohni Mahiwal. Sohni Mahiwal is an old tale that centres around Sohni, a heroine who longs to be with her true love who lives across the river. In order to be with him, Sohni crosses the river each night using an earthenware pot to keep her afloat. However, one night her sister-in-law replaces the pot with a vessel of unbaked clay which dissolves in the water and causes Sohni to vanish. A tale told through movement and sound, this mesmerising performance spoke to universal notions of love and longing. Where the cascades of water and the blazes of the night sky were replaced with the lustre of mirrors and a bulwark of armour clad bodies overseeing the lovers poetic tragedy.
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Taking its cue from the anthropological objects in Freud’s studio, the exhibition poetically investigates figures from history whose narratives and visual representation are underpinned by kink and fetish tropes. Drawing from religion and mythology Freud used character flaws and perversions from certain protagonists to build the aetiology of his diagnostic frameworks. Ironically, discussion of these individuals – found in his lesser-known texts – are some of the only instances in his theoretical paradigm where femininity and as a result female genitalia is discussed as something other then ‘lack’. By drawing attention to and re-enacting these characters – goddesses, saints, constellations – Booth plays with sidelined and omitted fragments of psychoanalytical discourse.
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Contributing Performers | Holly Anderson and Tay Haggarty
Exhibition documentation | Anastasia Booth and Sam Cranstoun
Exhibition documentation | Anastasia Booth and Sam Cranstoun
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Dead Wait | 2014 | QUT H Block Galleries, Brisbane 
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POETRY EVENT | 2014 | LEVEL, Brisbane
Exhibiting artists | Anastasia Booth, Danielle Clej, Courtney Coombs, Sam Cranstoun, Brooke Ferguson, David Michael Thomas, Leen Reithmuller, Erika Scott
As Long as it Takes (2012) featured in The Dinner Party, Richard Bell | 2013 | Exhibited across a range of sites
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Image Credit | Still from The Dinner Party, Richard Bell
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Crude Tools, Feeble Actions abstracts home-made BDSM objects and sites; finding lapses that occur between fanciful projection and DIY aesthetic. Foregrounding Booth’s interest in drawing association between art history and erotica; where notions of materiality, marginality, and ritual collapse across discourse. Employing installation, sculpture, video, performance and sound, a myriad of materials make tangible the paradoxes encompassing modes of bodily labour, sensuality falling short in absurdities embrace.
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Nine Holes | 2012 | Brunswick Art Space, Melbourne 
Nine Holes functioned as a catalogue of objects formed from autobiographical aspects of little-known Australians, ones who had kink or queer aspects in their histories. From the home-made whips of composer Percy Grainger, to the objects from the Nine Holes precent of brothels that formed Margaret street (Brisbane), to the salacious affair of a trans sharp shooter and their recorded yet unofficial queer marriage.
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Ache Deep | 2012 | Current Projects, Brisbane
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