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. 

Watson’s print series experimental beds (2012) was inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s architectural drawings of the Academical Village at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The resulting etchings incorporate Jefferson’s drawings of the Rotunda and Pavilions there, along with Watson’s sketches of artifacts unearthed at Monticello’s Mulberry Row and vegetables grown in Jefferson’s “experimental beds.” the holes in the land (2015) is a series of six etchings born out of an artistic fellowship at the British Museum, where Watson worked on “Engaging Objects,” a research project on Indigenous Australian cultural material held in the British Museum’s collections since the 19th and early 20th centuries. The etchings feature items like a pituri bag (to hold a wood ash and leaf mixture, which when chewed acted as a stimulant), a wooden club from Moreton Bay, and an apron from the Mara Tribe. These objects act as  reminders of the symbolic holes they represent for Indigenous Australian culture.

Organized by Maura Reilly, Director