Judy Watson: mundunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri
The central thread in this exhibition of forty years of work by Judy Watson is a larger narrative that seeks justice for the silenced. In a seductive aesthetic, paintings, sculpture, prints, and film are infused with story, grief, and loss to build a cultural reclamation that has blazed its own trail.
The title of Judy Watson’s forty-year survey at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) is from a poem written by her son Otis Carmichael in Waanyi language, and translates as “tomorrow the tree grows stronger.” In this context it underlines a central thread running through the exhibition. Each work has seductive visual qualities, and fits within a larger narrative seeking justice for Aboriginal and other First Nations peoples, and other often silenced forces including the environment, women, brutal colonial histories, grief, and loss. Together they build a sense of a rising and irresistible force that won’t be quenched, a cultural reclamation that has blazed its own trail.
This is Watson’s largest survey to date and spans the breadth of her work—printmaking where she started, her emotive and water-infused unframed canvases that move with the air, the public art that has a presence all over Australia and the world, installations that narrate potent stories, and artist’s books which feature personal narratives with universal effect. Her artist films, a medium in which she has worked since 2005, are also screened in the exhibition, bringing to light this powerful addition to her other work.
Curated by QAG’s Katina Davidson, the exhibition is an experience both fluid and immersive. Located in and around the gallery’s Watermall, a beautiful architectural space bookended with light, Watson’s bronze sculpture walama, 2000, is central. This collection of termite mound shapes stand like sentinels in, and reflected by, the water. As tall as people, their collective presence holds the space. The gentle passage of light and air conducted through this central gallery is a poetic reflection of Watson’s heritage as Waanyi, “running water people.”
Watson is a serial collaborator, she and Davidson have built the exhibition together. Four themes were chosen to divide the work—notions of identity, the environment, the archive, and feminism—and these flow throughout the three galleries independent of chronology in an elastic and expansive way, one into the other.
Watson is amongst Australia’s most significant artists. She was selected to be part of the QAG’s first Asia Pacific Triennial, 1993, won the prestigious Moët & Chandon Fellowship, 1995, represented Australia at the Venice Biennale with Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Yvonne Koolmatrie, 1997, won the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award and the 23rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Work on Paper Art Award, 2006, and was acknowledged with an Australia Council Visual Arts Fellowship, 2015.
The constancy of her concerns are represented in the exhibition’s 130 works (from 1981-2023). Watson’s interest in women’s literature opened early in her studies to a developing knowledge of the specific circumstances of her Aboriginal heritage. A commitment to environmental concerns was also visible early.
Identity has shaped the direction of her work, and often draws close to Watson’s Country in Queensland’s Lawn Hill Gorge / Boodjamulla. This is a place where subterranean water may bubble to the surface from the ground; Watson’s canvases are developed horizontal, soaked in pigment, walked or danced on, with shapes (shells, faces, markings) painted, often translucent, over the top. Her ancestor Rosie survived a massacre at Lawn Hill, and this story is told in Watson’s salt in the wound installation, 2008-09, and the painting water, light, reeds (wanami, mabibarr, bulinja), 2019. In these works, the circumstances of Rosie’s survival, the bayonet wound which scarred her for life, and the view from underneath the surface of the water (where she breathed through a reed) take us inside the emotional undertow.
Notable too is 40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill station, 2018, which relates a story drawn from the 1880s. Documented in the literature is the practice of assembling the ears of massacre victims on the homestead wall in this place (as a warning to Aboriginal people). Ears cast in wax, and hammered to the wall, are stark and arresting.
The archive has been a significant source of material for Watson’s own family and she notes the tragedy of the collecting practices of previous generations, with seminal works such as our hair in your collections, our bones in your collections, our skin in your collections, 1997, made after she spent time as a resident in “the bowels” of the British Museum. Also literally bathed in loss is water under the bridge, tumamun, 2020, a film which traces a chronology of Indigenous / colonial conflict along the Brisbane River. Her statement for this work reads in part, “the river is scarified / it runs with the blood of memory / we are here / listening.”
The environment is both context and subliminal, and a large new QAG acquisition hangs in the watermall adjacent to the walama, 2000, sculpture. moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram, 2022, includes a chart of temperatures (1910-2019) heading steadily upward, with mussel shapes, the area’s rivers, a spectrogram representing the sound of the Kabi Kabi word gila (light coloured native bee), and nets that float over a variable indigo background, its markings ghostly and skeletal. A feminist undercurrent is drawn from the knowledge of women close to Watson.
This exhibition brings together Watson’s significant and memorable works, collaborative assays, and a richness of narrative, both historical and contemporary, that engages and argues for new realities. It celebrates Watson’s sustained contribution, and the power of work that opens both the psyche and the heart toward greater understanding and stronger futures.
This article was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67
EXHIBITION
Judy Watson: mundunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri
23 March – 11 August 2024
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Lines —Aligning your consciousness with the flow
22 June – 14 October 2024
21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan