mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

as a vessel that carries her culture and Country with her while absorbing everything around her — an image manifested in two halves with bailer shell . 7 When the Musée du quai Branly opened in Paris in 2006, two halves with bailer shell and another work, museum piece 2006, were reproduced and embedded into the museum's architecture. In returning to France, two halves with bailer shell furthered the osmotic exchange between the artist's Country and this site of colonial power. Commissioning curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda Croft wrote that the work 'signals the changing status of Indigenous communities in museum practice'. 8 David Garneau's evocative term 'vertical invaders' is relevant here, with its reference to artists who 'have gathered enough Western tools along with their own equipment — to challenge the colonial imaginary from within the settlers' own institutions and through their own treasured means', which is a defining feature of the Indigenous in art. 9 Reproduced in luminous flash glass (mimicking Watson's wash technique), laminated to steel and installed on the ceiling of the museum's staff entrance, two halves with bailer shell has infiltrated the institution in that the ineffable and inalienable presence of Waanyi women and culture literally hangs over the museum workers' heads. Like the Musée du quai Branly, the Palais de Tokyo is located on the banks of the Seine, and was the site of 'Reclaim the Earth', a 2022 group exhibition that included Watson's work alongside 13 other artists and collectives, some of whom are from Indigenous nations located in Australia and Canada. 10 That the river should connect Watson's time in Paris over many years is more than a convenient segue between otherwise disconnected projects; rather, the artist's international presence has been indelibly tied to water ever since she represented Australia alongside Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Anmatyerre people, 1910–96) and Yvonne Koolmatrie (Ngarrindjeri people, b.1944) at the 1997 Venice Biennale in the exhibition titled 'Fluent'. In Watson's works, water is an artery between her Country and the rest of the world, wherein one passes into the other in a process of 'cultural leakage'. 11 'Reclaim the Earth' turned to Indigenous as well as feminist, ecological and socialist politics in response to the climate crisis, by seeking forms of relationality beyond the nature–culture divide. It is worth considering Tuscarora Nation scholar Jolene Rickard's citation of the Australian feminist Elizabeth Grosz, who wrote, 'art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change'. Rickard asserts that the emergence of global Indigenous art is precisely about such change. She further argues: . . . the term 'global Indigenous art' . . . encompasses only those artists whose works show an acknowledgement of the ongoing conditions of colonial settler nations, the continuing dispossession of land and resources, and an awareness of Indigenous worldviews as part of the future of global cultures. 12 Judy Watson and Rebecca Cummins, Casteline, Chianti, Italy 1992 lnstallation view of museum piece 2006, Musée du quai Branly, Paris 71 70