B. 1959

Judy Watson is one of Australia’s most prolific contemporary Indigenous Australian artists, boasting an expansive career of over three decades. Watson is a multi-media artist, with works spanning drawing, print-making, painting, sculpture, installation and video mediums. 

Watson’s practice is interested in the female kinship and connection she holds to Country, hailing from the Waanyi Country of north-east Queensland. She has described her experience of visiting her grandmother’s Country as ‘learning from the ground up,’ with much of her work informed by the relationship between the land and her body. Watson commonly incorporates natural materials in her work, often painting her canvases while laid on the ground to allow the earth's natural contours to shape their final appearance. 

Across Watson’s varied practice, the presence of Country is tangible. Her compositions speak to the complexities of human history, demonstrated through elaborate layers of imagery. The works Watson produces are characterised by a careful choice of colours, textures and subject matter. As shown within red tides, Watson constructs her works through dense layers of imagery, showcasing her detail-oriented eye for printmaking. By overlapping colours and patterns that would typically clash, Watson demonstrates a sophisticated ability to maintain visual balance within her works. 

Watson’s art is deeply political, referencing culturally significant artifacts to explore the history of colonial violence against Aboriginal people. For Watson, documents taken from state archives are vessels for ancestral experiences. The act of repurposing archival materials is one of care, caring for ancestral knowledge by highlighting their experiences of dispossession. By interpreting these documents as containers of ancestral memory, these works reawaken otherwise forgotten histories, speaking to the legacy of colonialism still present in contemporary Australia. 

Across her career Watson has been recognised with several accolades, including representing Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale alongside Emily Kam Kngwarreye and Yvonne Koolmatrie. Watson’s work features in the collections of all Australian state institutions, shown in notable international collections such as the British Museum, Tate Modern and the Tokyo National University of Technology. For lovers of contemporary Aboriginal art, look no further than Judy Watson’s intricately crafted works.