by Curator Hetti Perkins once described Judy Watson’s work as a “tender trap”, due to her “alluring beauty” and ability to transmit powerful, often painful messages. This is in full evidence at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), which is showcasing four decades of practice across more than 120 works by the Mundubbera, Meeanjin/Magandjin/Brisbane-born artist. It is the most extensive survey of Watson’s work to date.
Even the title of the exhibition, mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri, which has a poetic beauty to its bite: in the language of Waanyi Watsons ancestors, it translates as “tomorrow the tree grows stronger”. The line is taken from a poem written by her son, Otis Carmichael: “now the tree is cut. tomorrow the tree grows stronger, fighting the ax that cut it. our people bite back.”
The first encounter visitors have with the exhibition is a striking installation just around the entrance to the gallery: a curved red gas, like a smile, painted on a white floor plinth, with a heavy pouring of white salt down its centre. At the back, which is a kind of hanging windbreak, there is a thick cut of branches. The evening before the opening, the visitors pause to admire the arrangement.
titled salt in the woundit refers to an incident in which Watson’s great-grandmother Rosie escaped Waanyi from the Native Police at Lawn Hill Station in north-west Queensland when she was a young woman – a story that went down matrilineally, until Watson heard it. from her grandmother Grace.
The gash, painted in red gold, represents the bayonet wound Rosie received while hiding with another girl during a windbreak. The two rolled down the hill and hid in a waterway, submerging themselves completely by placing rocks on their hips and using hollows as breathing tubes.
Rosie carried the bayonet wound the rest of her life, and Watson said that the ocher gash in her installation is “the open wound with the salt in it, which comes down through the generations. Transgenerational trauma throughout history and our families.”
Previous presentations of the work include an installation of 40 pairs of wax-cast ears, attached to the gallery wall – a haunting reminder of colonial violence documented in the same place. At QAG, this installation is tucked within the main gallery space, a truth bomb ready to explode as the viewer rounds the corner.
On the wall behind him salt in the wound, scores of small bronze stones are arranged in the shape of the continent. The stones were first shown – in a different configuration – as part of Australia’s landmark exhibition for the 1997 Venice Biennale. At QAG, the stones are a “partial map of carnage” documenting the sites where colonists massacred Australia’s First Peoples. “I didn’t have all of them, because I didn’t have enough bronze stones,” says Watson. A list of sites can be found in the Watson 2016 video names of placesalso part of the exhibition.
Watson is relaxed and at ease when talking about her work, and she regularly checks in on other artists who have contributed to various pieces, as collaborators or studio assistants, and compliments the installation crew. She shows a slick of water on the ocher in salt in the wound, and marvels: “This has never happened before; this time, the salt began to cry.” Somehow, magnesium salt has contaminated the regular salt that is generally used for work – but she seems happy.
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“I might use it again – it adds another dimension,” she says. “As an artist, you control certain things and there are other things you cannot control. And that’s what I love.”
There is something of an alchemist in Watson, who came to printmaking art in the late 1970s at the Darling Downs Institute of Higher Education in Toowoomba, and studied lithography (a chemistry-based printing method) at the University of Tasmania. , and Monash University. in Gippsland, Victoria. The canvases she is known for may owe much of their colour, texture and pattern to chemical reactions – planned and unplanned.
Watson often uses indigo (which she fell in love with during a residency in Italy) and shibori, a technique of folding and tying fabric to affect dye patterns, which she picked up from her younger sister, who studied textile production. “I just remember seeing the fabric go into the indigo dye, and as it comes out it turns green, and then it suddenly changes as it oxidizes and goes blue,” says Watson . “It often seems that the things that change are what I respond to.”
Literature has also influenced her practice in other ways: she describes her love of collaboration in the atmosphere and process of the print studio, and she describes drawing as the source of all her work. In their 1997 series our hair in your collections, our bones in your collections and our skin in your collections (all featured in the exhibition) she “artistically repatriated” the Waanyi wares held by the British Museum by tracing their contours.
Visitors will notice recurring motifs throughout Watson’s prints on paper and canvas, including string and rope, leaves and grasses, spines (plants, fish or spears), and shield shapes, termite mounds and sacks – all at draw on Waanyi Country and culture. Likewise, the show-stopping installation in the gallery’s Central Water Mall features a collection of cast bronze forms such as termite mounds, fish traps and discarded rag bags.
Watson says that a return trip to her ancestral homeland, Gorge Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) national park in 1990 with her family shaped her art practice: “My uncle Ken Isaacson showed me: down on the ground there were scattered stone tools; in the sides of the gorges there was rock engraving and painting. There are important sites through there. So I have done a lot of work [about the idea] look at the ground, or learn from the ground up.”
The exhibition, curated by Katina Davidson (Kullilli/Yuggera), curator of Australian indigenous art, is organized around four themes that encompass Watson’s main ongoing concerns: identity, the archive, feminism and environmentalism.
In conversation, Watson is unequivocal and emphatic about these matters. In her art, she is more subtle. Her ideas often creep slowly into the viewer’s consciousness: you might be drawn to the beauty or aesthetic of the work from afar, only to catch the details and layers of meaning upon closer inspection.
I ask Watson if she has ever been tempted by other forms of advocacy, and she laughs: “There are many other ways to do it. But there’s something about working with the body – putting it through my body – that feels good too. And it’s not that people will understand things right away. But that’s all right. I don’t understand a lot of things right away either … and what I don’t understand is more interesting I think, and it takes me on another journey.”
