mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

Watson's painting moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectogram 2022 operates in this register — as does the thrust of her practice — by visualising multiple ways of mapping waterways and their connections to Country, culture, history and climate. This work on cotton cloth began as altogether different work. in between a 'k' and a 'g' 2021 was produced with artist Tor Maclean and Kabi Kabi Elder Aunty Helena Gulash for 'Final Call', an exhibition installed in the Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Garden, in Tanawha, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, for the 2021 Horizon Festival. The cloth banners combined earthen materials found at the site with scientific charts from The University of Queensland Heron Island Research Station, where Watson had completed a residency, together with spectrograms of Aunty Helena speaking in her language. Tied around trees or suspended between them, the earthy, yet ethereal, works called viewers 'to consider how these sophisticated systems of knowledge founded on listening to and caring for Country can inform our collective response to climate change'. 13 Watson later wrapped these cloth banners in netting and other materials, and dyed them indigo in her cousin Dorothy's backyard in suburban Meeanjin/Magandjin, whose home has been flooded by Oxley Creek on numerous occasions. Watson connects her use of the colour blue to trade and colonialism, as well as her travels as an art student when she encountered vibrant blue cloth, ceramics and architecture in Morocco, and purchased pure pigment during a residency in Italy. 14 The colour blue also embodies the fluidity of water that bubbles up from the depths of Boodjamulla Lawn Hill Gorge in Waanyi Country into Watson's dreams and onto her canvases. Back in the studio, Watson projected images of waterways onto the indigo-dyed fabric, either painting 'in the dark' directly from a projection, or tracing lines with graphite to later be painted in by Watson and others who came by the studio to visit and assist. The work's materiality indexes Country, travel and Watson's relational networks, and its title indexes the various images represented. The elements depicted in moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectogram form 'a vast network of associations between language, culture, knowledge, and the environment'. 15 Primarily, this network speaks from Watson's grounding in a shared Aboriginal culture with a local specificity. It also speaks to the implications of rising temperatures on oceans and waterways — and food sources — on a global scale. This mode of address is further emphasised in lost islands of the seine with temperature chart 2022, which speaks directly to the Palais de Tokyo's location via the ghostly depiction of an old map of Paris showing some of the islands in the Seine that no longer exist. In a joint panel convened at the opening of the international Indigenous exhibition 'Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel' at the National Gallery of Canada, in 2019, Inuk scholar Heather Igloliorte pondered how 'we can move . . . to understand Indigeneity within an lost islands of the seine with temperature chart 2022 in-progress OPPOSITE lost islands of the seine with temperature chart 2022 74