mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

Garneau and Moulton's dialogue echoes Watson's statement and opens onto a consideration of Indigeneity as a shared (that is, shared between First Peoples) domain of sovereign beings in motion. By tracing some of Watson's networked travels, I seek to elucidate how her artworks exercise this domain. I focus in particular on the role of water as source, conduit, metaphor, process and material in Watson's practice. Her works embody the fluid interconnectivity that flows between the specificity of Waanyi Country into the circulatory system of the world's rivers and oceans, offering us a way of being Indigenous in a globalised world. In 1995, Watson was awarded the Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship and travelled to Hautvillers, in the north-east of France. At the time, the French government was conducting nuclear tests on Mururoa and its sister atoll Fangataufa in the Tuamotu Archipelago in the southern Great Ocean, sparking international protests. Watson recounts feeling conflicted in France, given her involvement in anti-nuclear efforts in Australia. The artist often seeks out water sources with deep cultural and spiritual meaning in other parts of the world, which she says 'somehow make[s] me feel much more connected to my Country'. 6 While in Hautvillers, she searched for a spring dedicated to St Helena, the Roman empress. Perhaps sparked by this confluence, Watson had a remarkable dream that later inspired two works, two halves with bailer shell and two halves with conch shell , both 2002. In her dream, a waterspout emerged from the ocean and cut a channel across the beach. At the bottom of the channel lay a large conch and a large bailer shell — shells with male and female associations and uses in Waanyi culture, which have also been objects of trade for millennia. In two halves with bailer shell , Watson has painted two abstract forms in delicate pale lines on a background of deep ultramarine and Prussian blue. The form on the right is filled with a series of concentric lines that trace its outer contour, while the form on the left remains an outline. These forms recur throughout Watson's oeuvre. They are both figure and vessel, and relate to the artist's matrilineal Waanyi ancestors. The forms also recall the visual metaphors Watson uses to describe herself. As a self-proclaimed 'cultural traveller', Watson sees herself I first met Judy Watson at her Yeronga studio in 2017. At the invitation of the Institute of Modern Art, I travelled to Meeanjin/Magandjin (Brisbane) from the west coast of Turtle Island to collaborate with four other Indigenous curators whose homelands are situated throughout the Great Ocean. 1 We dubbed ourselves the 'Visiting Curators' to signal our approach to working — with one another, with the artists, and across the territories that were and were not our own. Patterns of visiting and movement have always shaped Indigenous peoples' relationships with Country and with one another, and the hospitality extended by Watson and the other artists to the Visiting Curators sparked new relationships and deepened existing ones, which we then carried back across the waters on our return home. 2 Watson has been cultivating extensive relational networks ever since her days as an art school student. She tells me: The more we travel back and forth, it's like a spider web that enables others to travel back with us. That's the most important thing, not that you just go one way but that you bring somebody back with you and bring back that knowledge and culture and then also pass on the network. 3 In the Transits and Returns exhibition catalogue that accompanied the final iteration of the project that brought me to Meeanjin/Magandjin in 2017, David Garneau and Kimberley Moulton exchange a series of letters in which they position travel as a defining feature of 'the Indigenous'. Reflecting on their meeting as a Métis man and a Yorta Yorta woman at a gathering in Sápmi, Moulton writes that travel 'is a conscious counter-action to the colonial control we have endured as First Peoples'. 4 In his reply, Garneau states: Indigenous people are sovereign not only because they live their Indigenous title to a specific territory recognised by the colonial nation. We are sovereign by virtue of our motion, our performance of territory. Moving, visiting, migrating and the pow-wow circuit are all exercises of domain rather than claims of dominion. When we travel inter-Nationally, we are learners and ambassadors. 5 Judy Watson: fluid visitations TARAH HOGUE two halves with bailer shell (detail) 2002 68