mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

Foreword CHRIS SAINES CNZM DIRECTOR, QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY | GALLERY OF MODERN ART Judy Watson is one of our most resolute and formidable storytellers — an artist who never falters in holding historical and present-day injustices to account. Since the early 1980s, Watson has drawn powerful stories and profound truths from the Country of her matrilineal family and fashioned them into fluid and ethereal works of art. In the process of their making and in their visual effect, her unstretched canvases are saturated with the polemical currents of our colonial, social and ecological history. Watson was born in 1959 in Mundubbera, south-east Queensland, but maintains an abiding connection to her Waanyi Country in the state's north-west through an unbroken line of female ancestors. It is from this spiritual home that her work emanates, wheresoever it grapples with local history, memory, grief and loss. As Hetti Perkins has noted, 'Judy Watson paints the country not from outside it but within it'. 1 Her work is not only a persistent and haunting requiem for cultural loss, but also an unbowed declaration of cultural reclamation. Watson is one of Australia's most globally collected and exhibited artists, and this exhibition is the most expansive of her career to date. 'mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson' includes more than 120 works that chart the wide reach of her artistic concerns. Its title, from a poem in Waanyi language by the artist's son Otis Carmichael, translates as 'tomorrow the tree grows stronger'. The deep time of Country, the long shadow of colonisation and the vital energy of feminism are all illuminated by Watson's ability to tell stories that might otherwise be erased from the landscape. Through the undulating fluency of forms in her printmaking, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and installation works, Watson summons up urgent human ideals. These concerns and archetypes linger, seducing the viewer as Watson returns time and again to the creek or the midden to strengthen her story of the enduring occupation of Australia's First People, and to refuse its elision from history. Country is ever-present in this work, inextricably interwoven in the matrilineal profiles and portraits of the Watson women and records of her family's place. Watson re-humanises the contents of archives and institutions, in which she has often worked as an artist in residence, drawing historical complexity from bureaucratic accounts of massacres and atrocities. She has also explored handwritten journal entries from Matthew Flinders's expeditions, with their rudimentary records of the Aboriginal people they encountered. For the first time, this exhibition presents Watson's video works as a significant group, as well as previously unexhibited original prints from the late 1970s and early 1980s which are fascinating precursors to Watson's artistic project. Pouring of Judy Watson sculpture for Queensland Indigenous Artist Public Art Commission, Urban Art Projects Foundry, Brisbane 2016 (Chris Saines pictured above right) 26