Design and Art Australia Online

Waanyi artist Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland in 1959, and raised in Brisbane. Her fine arts education began in 1977, when she began a two year Diploma of Creative Arts at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in Toowoomba. She moved to Hobart the following year to undertake a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania, which she completed in 1982. In 1986 she completed a Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts at Monash University in Gippsland, Victoria.

While Watson had shown her work in a number of galleries during her student days, it wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that she came to be involved in significant exhibitions. Among her first solo shows were 'a sacred place for these bones’ at Griffith University in Brisbane (following a three-month residency there) in 1989 and 'groundwork’ at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 1990. Early group shows included the seminal exhibition 'A Koori Perspective’ at Artspace, Sydney in 1989, the First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1993 and the 1993 Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) – which focused on the work of a range of indigenous Australian artists in recognition of the UN International Year of the Worlds Indigenous People.

Watson specialised in printmaking during her fine art studies, and thus initially favoured works on paper, however she soon diversified her practice to include painting, installation and sculpture. An important early print in which Watson explored her Indigenous heritage was the 1988 etching touching my mother’s blood (National Gallery of Australia). the guardians (1986/87) was one of Watson’s first sculptural works, consisting of large figure-shaped panels adorned with mixed media and powdered pigment, representing the artist’s matrilineal Indigenous ancestors including her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother. This work was purchased for the AGNSW’s collection, and featured in the 'Aratjara: Art of the first Australians’ touring exhibition initiated by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf, in 1993.

The theme of women’s connectedness that was explored in the guardians is highly significant for the artist, and the family members, sites and ancestral stories of Watson’s family history have been a foundation of her artistic practice since the early days of her career. A critical turning point came in 1990 when she and her family visited Riversleigh Station in north western Queensland, where her maternal grandmother Grace Isaacson was born. Victoria Lynn, writing for the catalogue of the 1995 'Antipodean Currents’ exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, notes that during the visit Watson “researched the history of Aboriginal people and the pastoral industry in the region. Her family showed her bush foods, Spinifex resin, native-bee’s honey (“sugarbag” as it is called colloquially) and rock paintings” (p.106). The creative and emotional resources Watson drew from this visit allowed her to consolidate her artistic language and, as she stated in a 2002 interview with curator Hetti Perkins, published in the book One Sun, One Moon, her practice has remained devoted to an “archeology of memory, history and site” (2007, p. 306).

Watson has said that the stories her grandmother shared with her as a child allowed her to “learn from the ground up – to feel the power of the land under your feet that resonates through your body connecting you to country – but also to feel and acknowledge the pride and empowerment of cultural reclamation” (Watson quoted in T. Mia & S. Morgan’s article “Going home to Country”). As this statement conveys, Watson is often concerned with memorialising the human imprint upon the natural world and reanimating sites by honouring those presences. This was achieved on a grand scale in 1994, when Watson was commissioned to create a permanent installation for the floor of the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Casula, NSW. Formerly a power station, the Art Centre conversion was in the last stages of completion at the time of the commission. Watson consulted with local community groups, conducted research in local land councils, museums and libraries, visited significant sites in the region, and workshopped ideas with Indigenous children and elders from the area to develop a design for the site. The Indigenous artists Cheryl Robinson, Gordon Hookey, Vivian Scott and Brook Andrew assisted Watson in the production of the Casula floor.

Watson undertook a similar research and consultation process to produce another commission in 1999: an etched zinc wall encountered when one enters Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Cultural Centre at the Melbourne Museum. The work was entitled Wurreka, which means “to speak” in the Wemba Wemba language of north-west Victoria, and consists of 74 individually etched panels of zinc, which each contain an image drawn from the Indigenous cultural heritage of south eastern Australia.

Watson adopts a contemplative and experimental approach to the traditional artists’ resources of ink, paint, charcoal, pastels and dry pigment, an approach that reflects her sensibilities as a printmaker. She attends to the way these materials react to each other, and the way different mediums and binders can be employed to achieve distinctive surfaces. Unpredicted effects that result, for instance, from the textures of the earth upon which she often works, the scrubbing away of layers of pigment, or the dried splashes and bubbles of ink, are allowed to dictate the progress of an image. Such processes, and her exploitation of the qualities of canvas as a cloth rather than a mere support for an image, reflect a fidelity to natural processes: the effects are evocative of the unpredictability of environmental and historical forces, and the way the earth retains the memory of layers of events. This approach is evident in the body of work Watson produced for 'Fluent’, the Australian exhibition co-curated by Brenda Croft, Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynn for the Venice Biennale in 1997 in which Watson’s work was exhibited alongside those of fellow Indigenous women artists Yvonne Koolmatrie and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Watson has also integrated found materials such as shells, natural oxides and stringy bark into her works.

The artist’s style is also marked by a tendency to extrapolate the symbolic and metaphorical resonances of the materials she uses in light of aspects of her own biography, and of the history of human occupation in Australia. As she writes of the work driftnet (1998), included in the 2000 Adelaide Biennial 'Beyond the Pale’, curated by Brenda Croft, it “references the destructive nature of those nets that entrap turtles and dolphins indiscriminately. It also alludes to my practice as an artist, travelling, collecting information, materials and meaning from places other than my own country. It holds the weave, the threads of cultural knowledge, a catcher of thoughts like a spirit net” (quoted in 'Beyond the Pale’ catalogue, p.88). The fact that Waanyi people are known as 'running water people’ is of great importance to the artist, and she evokes the qualities of water in many of her works.

Watson has been a committed environmentalist since she shared a home with conservationists as a student in Hobart. When she moved to Townsville after her studies were complete she became a member of the North Queensland Conservation Council, and participated in conservation campaigns concerned with the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland and the Franklin River in Tasmania. In 1995, Watson was awarded the Moët & Chandon fellowship, and two important bodies of work resulted from the associated French residency, the first of which pursued environmental themes. The French government was undertaking nuclear testing in the Pacific at the time of her residency, and Watson produced a series of works articulating her sense of “feeling compromised” by these circumstances, as she explained in an article she wrote for Artlink entitled “Nucleus: Feeling Compromised” (1996). Two paintings from this period: the water boiled and turned white and pacific vessel were among the works selected for the 'In Place (Out of Time) exhibition: Contemporary Art in Australia’ exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1997.

Also included in this exhibition were a series of etchings derived from periods of research undertaken at the Horniman and Science Museum and the British Museum (Museum of Mankind) in the United Kingdom during her French residency. The etchings, now in the collection of the AGNSW, are titled our bones in your collections, our skin in your collection and our hair in your collection (1997). They reflect another key artistic preoccupation for Watson: the racial classification of Indigenous Australians historically, and their fragmented and reified presence within the archival collections of museums around the world.

Recurring themes in Watson’s work are shells, middens, termite mounds, vessels, fossils, plants, islands and maps, and these are frequently rendered in a manner that evoke the corporeal: bones, hair, scarred skin and blood. Through this treatment of the body, Watson explores both the human presence within the land and the impact of the malevolent structures of the State upon indigenous Australians. The latter was the theme of her 2005 work a preponderance of aboriginal blood, which resulted from a commission from the State Library of Queensland. The library sought a range of women artists’ responses, in the form of artists’ books, to the history of voting rights in Queensland. This was for the dual purpose of commemorating a century of Queensland women’s suffrage, and 40 years of Indigenous suffrage. a preponderance of aboriginal blood, which consisted of manipulated reproductions of assimilation policy documents splashed with red ink, was awarded the Telstra Work on Paper Award at the 23rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, 2006. In the award documentation Watson is quoted as saying of the archival material: “Its heaviness dictates an era of constriction and control for all Aboriginal people caught within its web.” In 2007 Watson addressed the theme in another artist’s book, but in a more personal register: under the act worked with family photographs and documentary evidence of her grandmother’s and great grandmother’s subjection to Queensland’s Aborigines Protection and the Restriction of Opium Act (1897). This work was included in 'Culture Warriors’, the inaugural Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, curated by Brenda Croft (2007).

Over the course of her career, Watson has undertaken international residencies in Italy, India, Canada, Norway and France. She has held numerous solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas, and her work is included in the collections of all major state galleries, as well as numerous overseas collections. At the time of writing, several survey shows of Watson’s work have been staged, including 'sacred ground beating heart: works by Judy Watson 1989-2003’, an international touring exhibition initiated by John Curtin Gallery in Perth, and 'Judy Watson: Selected Works 1990-2005’ at the Queensland University Art Museum. In 2006 Watson received the National Gallery of Victoria’s Clemenger Contemporary Art Award.

Watson has held lecturing and tutoring positions at a range of universities, and has also been active in encouraging and assisting other Indigenous artists to research their heritage, access art resources, and develop approaches to creating art works that reflect their history, identity and location. She has undertaken a number of public art commissions subsequent to 'Casula floor piece’ and Wurreka. These include an installation in the Walama forecourt (2000) at the Sydney airport, for which artist Brook Andrew also contributed sculptural works. After consultation with Maningrida weavers in the Northern Territory, Watson designed large corroded steel structures that echo the shapes of dilly bags, termite mounds and sedge grass fences, while she also developed a shell theme for the site in consultation with La Perouse (Sydney) shellwork artist Esme Timbery. Other commissions include Ngarrn-Gi – Land (which means “to know” in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people of the Melbourne region), a 50 metre long, three-panelled zinc wall installed in the foyer of the Victorian County Court in 2002, and heart/land/river (2004), which consists of 18 large photographic glass panels with fibre optic lighting, at the Brisbane Magistrate’s Court. In 2005, Watson was selected to produce two works, a glass ceiling and a glass wall facade, that were permanently installed in the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, which opened in 2006. Watson was among a group of eight indigenous artists whose work was integrated into the architectural fabric of the buildings, the others being Ningura Napurrula, Lena Nyadbi, Michael Riley, Tommy Watson, John Mawurndjul, Paddy Bedford and Gulumbu Yunupingu. After many years living in different parts of Australia and long periods of time overseas, at the time of writing Watson had returned to live in Brisbane with her family.

Writers:

Fisher, LauraNote:

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed