Judy Watson: shadow bone

“As an artist I seek to reveal layers beneath the ground, within objects, their history, their making, and their taking, to ‘rattle the bones of the museum,’ to wake the dead who are not dead but alive to all of us.” – Judy Watson

Judy Watson is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, whose Indigenous matrilineal family is from Waanyi country in northwest Queensland. Her work is often concerned with unearthing hidden histories of Indigenous Australian experiences under colonialism. The artist’s process evolves by working from site and memory, revealing Indigenous histories, following lines of emotional and physical topography that center on particular places and moments in time. Spanning painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and video, her practice often draws on archival documents and materials, such as maps, letters, and police reports, to unveil institutionalized discrimination against Indigenous Australian people. 

This exhibition, shadow bone, features two single-channel videos and two series of etchings. The video the keepers (2016) follows the journey of Watson’s behind-the-scenes viewing of the Indigenous Australian collections held in the British Museum. ("Keeper” is the British word for curator.) The video conveys both the sensation of viewing the Indigenous collections (a privilege the artist knows few of her fellow Indigenous Australians can afford) and what it is like for the objects themselves to be located Out of Country, waiting to be returned. A second video, shadow bone (2022), layers documents sourced from the Queensland State Archives. In it, the light depicts truth, and the gesture of covering the face suggests shielding oneself from horror and dismay. It can also represent the “blocking out” or denial of a true history. In Watson’s distinctive style, multiple layers of video drift, emerge, and submerge across the screen. There are familiar insertions of Watson’s preexisting artworks as well as some pencil drawings from the 1880s by a young Aboriginal man from Queensland, known only as Oscar. Other layers reveal handwritten and typed letters from the archives and X-ray images of skulls. Finally, the glimmering light bounces off the skin of the water, the body of Country outshining and overshadowing the other layers, where viewers are left with the shadow of hands until the video fades to black. 

Organized by Maura Reilly, Director