In 2015, her work was included in Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, Tate Britain, London and Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation, British Museum, London. Judy Watson: the edge of memory was exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 2018. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK presented Judy Watson in 2020, a version to be shown at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria and touring.
Watson has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas. Her works comprise painting, printmaking, drawing, video, sculpture and public art. Watson works from site, archives and collective memory to reveal the fault lines of history within place and Country, lays bare the impact of colonial history and the institutional discrimination of Aboriginal people, celebrates Aboriginal cultural practice, and registers our precarious relationship with the environment. Watson’s Aboriginal matrilineal family are Waanyi, whose Country is located in north-west Queensland. Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland and lives and works in Brisbane. Touring nationally with NETS Victoria.Ĭlosed Sundays, Mondays and public holidays Looking Glass is organised by TarraWarra Museum of Art and Ikon Gallery with Curator Hetti Perkins. It is, in reality, a nightmare, a shimmering mirage, a candle in the coming storm. In their works, the artists poignantly remind us how the pursuit of the Great Australian Dream is not what it seems.
Essentially, this exhibition is about Australia’s secret and dirty war-a battle fought on many fronts from colonial massacres to Stolen Generations, from the Maralinga bomb tests to the climate emergency. Watson and Scarce, like all Indigenous Australians, share recent and personally painful histories of the destruction, exploitation and degradation of not only the land, but the people of the land. Colloquially, this is often referred to as the Dreaming, an extraordinary perception of the connection of Country, community and culture. Yet, while their works may refer to specific events, their enigmatic and often intimate forms, gestures and marks also imply an immersive timelessness outside of a linear chronology an existence today that is more than the ‘now’. Together these artists offer a far-ranging and holistic portrait of Country where the creation and experience of art recalls the lived, remembered and inherited history of Aboriginal people. Watson and Scarce express the inseparable oneness of Aboriginal people with Country, a familial relationship established for millennia. Watson’s ochres, charcoal and pigments, pooled and washed upon flayed canvases, have a natural affinity and synergy with Scarce’s fusion of fire, earth and air. At its heart, the exhibition is both a love song and a lament for Country a fantastical alchemy of the elemental forces of earth, water, fire and air. Looking Glass is an important and timely exhibition which brings together two of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists-Waanyi artist, Judy Watson and Kokatha and Nukunu artist, Yhonnie Scarce. Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce
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