mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

Judy Watson has exhibited internationally since 1983, but her inclusion in 'The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1993 was a career watershed. Soon after, she represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale alongside Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who had passed away in late 1996, and Yvonne Koolmatrie. The name of that groundbreaking exhibition, 'Fluent', was apt for an artist with a deep sensitivity to currents and tides. One of the key works from this period, sacred ground beating heart 1989, pulses with the subterranean water that feeds the springs, rivers and creeks in Waanyi Country and whirls with static electricity and dust, drawing on the enduring spiritual and life forces of ancestors in whose footsteps the artist treads. Watson's practice has long been centred on truth-telling, particularly in regard to protecting the environment, government policy towards Indigenous Australians, and the role of institutions that have collected and house Indigenous cultural material. Watson refers to her research-driven practice as 'rattling the bones of the museum', bringing her lens as an Aboriginal woman to bear on its content. From the beginning of her journey, she has searched relentlessly for truth and meaning by taking different forms of artistic action, often through lines of enquiry that have met with official resistance. By interrogating the residual body of evidence of enduring Aboriginal occupation in postcolonial collection-building and record-keeping, Watson returns agency to its subjects and objects. In recovering history from place and, indeed, reinfusing it back into place, Watson has made several significant public art projects around Australia, including at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). Commissioned to mark GOMA's tenth anniversary, the monumentally scaled bronze net sculpture, tow row 2016, is emblematic of ancient fishing technology of the kind once deployed along the coastlines and waterways of south-east Queensland. Its design was based on early photographs of the butterfly-shaped nets Watson observed in Maningrida, Arnhem Land, and one from Doomadgee, close to Waanyi Country, held in the State Library of Queensland. tow row 's complex netting weave was created in collaboration with Ngugi artist Elisa Jane Carmichael, and the work typifies Watson's longstanding practice of engaging the assistance of young First Nations artists in the making of her work. For all its strength of purpose, there is a common thread of humility that courses through Watson's art in the mode of its production, and even in the lower-case typography of its naming. 'mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson' is shown across the Queensland Art Gallery's central exhibition spaces, including its Watermall. It features a major new acquisition, moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram 2022, which faces a selection of inverted bronze termite mound and dillybag sculptures that appear to drift over the water's surface. The exhibition also gathers other sculptural works, including the formless sensuality of freshwater lens 2010, suspended over the Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Gallery, and salt in the wound 2008/09, which painfully evokes Watson's great- great-grandmother's escape from a massacre at Boodjamulla Lawn Hill. At the exhibition's core are Watson's large unstretched canvases, impressively and seductively charged with pigment and pastel or, nature print–like, carrying an impressed rubbing of what lies beneath. These works have been a mainstay of Watson's oeuvre since the late 1980s. They are pressed with intense fields of ochre, ultramarine and sanguine pigments that speak of land and sea, tracing human occupation through the evidence of its skin and blood, somehow mapping the emotional and psychological states to which this ancient land has borne witness. tow row (detail) 2016 29