mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

a black and white history of queensland according to the artist 1–10 (detail) 2007 OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE LEFT Judy Watson, Greene Street Studio, New York 2000; Joyce and Judy Watson, Bharat Bhavan Arts Studio, Bhopal, India 1994; painting for Venice Biennale, Sydney 1997; Judy Watson and Margaret Wilson, Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, Townsville; Watson with Tari family, Southern Highlands, New Guinea 1984; Watson (above left), Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts PP.40–1 A termite mound on Waanyi Country, and Watson's bronze walama (detail) 2000 EARLY CAREER In 1979 Watson enrolled in a Diploma in Creative Arts and Literature at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, leaving Brisbane to study in Toowoomba. The move allowed her to discover not only printmaking but also ideologies she would ascribe to all facets of her life. Early influences included publications on race theory and relations regarding First Nations, Jewish and African Americans, as well as poetry, feminism and identity politics. Attention paid to global injustices may have been Watson's attempt at reconciling the stark disparity between international and local attitudes to fundamentally similar issues, such as those witnessed within Australia against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — including her own family history of great-great-grandmother Rosie surviving a massacre at Lawn Hill as a child. A thirst for knowledge, perspective, adventure and self-growth propelled Watson to flee conservative Queensland to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania, which she graduated from in 1982. In lutruwita, she became involved in the movement to stop the proposed Franklin River dam. This action led by conservationists successfully stopped the project, saving precious habitat and cultural sites. 8 The victory ignited a fire in Watson that has burned throughout her career, asserting the presence of politics in her psyche and artworks. At this time, Watson began to interrogate what 'Aboriginal art' is, and who was allowed to make it. These questions were not directed towards the style or aesthetic of her work, but concerned her identity as an Aboriginal woman. It is important to keep in mind that powerhouse Indigenous artist and curator collectives Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative and proppaNOW were yet to be established (1987 in Sydney and 2003 in Brisbane respectively), and that rhetoric about contemporary Indigenous identity, let alone art, was far from mainstream. Terms such as 'Urban Indigenous Artist', which were being assigned to city-based artists, were critiqued as a way to anthropologise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. In 2002, Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang artist Richard Bell wrote: 'those [ethnographic] barriers serve to re-enforce the Regional System (classification of Aboriginal Art based on geographical areas — for example, Western Desert, Eastern Arnhem Land, Urban, etc) . . . we (urban blacks) can be authentic Aboriginal People.' 9 In early 1983, Watson was appointed printmaking lecturer, teaching lithography in Townsville, North Queensland. It was here that she had the opportunity to teach her mother, Joyce, in one of her first classes. 10 In 1986, Judy became one of the co-founders of Umbrella Studio, an arts organisation and gallery that still serves artists today. When she could, Watson also made trips back to Country. Over the next decade, Watson would complete a Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts, focused on lithography, in 1986 at Monash University, Melbourne, where she created the guardians 1986–87 and experimented with slide 43