“tomorrow the tree grows stronger”
mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri – the title of Judy Watson’s survey show is registered in lowercase, like most of her titles, drawn from over four decades of practice. This is one stylistic convention, an underlying trope, that acts as conduit for the thematic depths Watson’s work invites us to fathom. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a poem by the artist’s son, Otis Carmichael, in the Waanyi language of Watson’s matrilineal family.
Judy Watson (Waanyi people, Australia b.1959), moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram, 2022, Indigo dye, graphite, synthetic polymer paint, waxed linen thread and pastel on cotton, 247 × 488cm. Purchased 2023 with funds raised through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Appeal / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. © Judy Watson/Copyright Agency. Photograph: N Harth © QAGOMA
The intentionality and often brisk phrases that name these works all carry weight. Word is given a running prominence within mudunama, with a series of poetic readings accompanying the opening weekend. Language, spoken and written, is one of the conceptual pillars of Watson’s practice. Others might include environment, water, family and gesture. It is predominately the latter, the tactile medium, which comprises this exhibition. This is self-evident in Watson’s most prolific form, pigment-laden paintings on unstretched canvas, arguably her signature pieces. Layered with myriad and sometimes experimentally varied techniques, the depths rendered with floating obovate forms represent indigenous tools, organic forms and abstracts alike. They evoke the saturation the accompanying phrasing often suggests. Her prints are also well represented here by some of the earliest, and most recent, pieces. They blur into the painterly, considering her ongoing use of monoprinting, leaving ghostly impressions to the stratum of her canvases, hinting at the strong continuity across eras and mediums. Fitting, as time very well might be added to the nexus of her key interests as an artist.
Judy Watson (Waanyi people, Australia b.1959) L–R: salt in the wound (detail, installation view, Queensland Art Gallery) 2008/09, salt, ochre, reeds, dimensions variable. Collection the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane (Meeanjin/Magandjin). Photograph: N Umek © QAGOMA / grandmother’s song, 2007, pigment and pastel on canvas, 196 × 107cm. Purchased 2007 with funds from Margaret Greenidge through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation and the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Photograph: N Harth © QAGOMA / walama (detail), 2000, bronze. 18 parts (various dimensions). Courtesy the artist, Milani Gallery and UAP Brisbane (Meeanjin/Magandjin). Photograph: C Baxter © QAGOMA. All images © Judy Watson/Copyright Agency
moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram, 2022, is a monumental painting on these themes, combining temporal data, a language spectrogram and watery motifs, running nearly five metres in length. Barring this, the largest works on display are her bronze sculptures. The gallery’s signature Watermall, including a vast expanse of liquid, has often pushed artists to expand on the notion of installation and seems like a perfect match for Watson. walama, 2000, consisting of seventeen emergent forms, in fact inverted dillybags, occupies this plane. A smaller bronze work bears further investigation, stingray hover, 2014, casts facsimile feeding depressions left by rays, presumably recorded by the artist once the tide receded. As one of Queensland’s most prominent artists, it is fitting that another sculpture, 2016’s tow row, sits at the entrance of GOMA, across the courtyard and listed as a component of the current show.
Judy Watson (Waanyi people, Australia b.1959), stingray hover, 2014, bronze, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Milani Gallery and UAP Brisbane (Meeanjin/Magandjin). © Judy Watson/Copyright Agency. Photograph: Rachel See. Image courtesy Urban Art Projects
A survey of such distinction offers a chance to reflect on the role of change the encompassed timeline captures. In the field of contemporary Indigenous art, the reckoning with both history and the present is one constant thread. Watson never averts her gaze in this regard, 40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill station, 2008, a work referencing a historical atrocity from Waanyi country in North West Queensland, is testament to this.
mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri translates to “tomorrow the tree grows stronger,” not just inviting reflection on the past and present but suggesting something a good survey show does: an implication for the future.
Felix Cehak is an artist and writer based in Eastern Australia and a PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design.
Queensland Art Gallery
23 March to 11 August 2024
Brisbane
