Watson’s monochromatic photo-lithographs from 1981 recount memories of the Brisbane suburb of Acacia Ridge in the 1970s. Hand-coloured and collaged, the photo-lithographs and screenprints suggest the monotony and gendered nature of domestic labour. Through the symbolic introduction of blood, Watson honours bloodlines that reach back into histories of domestic servitude. Images of hanging and bottled meat have residues of washing and of preserving meat, alongside those of human remains, as if a cleaning-up of history.

In 1998 Judy Watson travelled to Aotearoa (New Zealand) as the recipient of the Vahine Pasifika artist residency at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. driftnet 1998 was made during the residency, added to in her Sydney studio and was first displayed in an exhibition of the same name at Christchurch Art Gallery. The body of work Watson made at this time respond to the Waitaha Canterbury region from her own identity as a Waanyi woman. Waanyi, of north-west Queensland’s Gulf country, are known as the ‘running water people’.

The work evokes the passage of water through the Pacific Ocean that connects and separates Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It refers to destructive netting and fishing practices, which entrap and kill turtles, dolphins and other marine creatures indiscriminately. It also alludes to a spirit net, a catcher of thoughts that holds threads of cultural knowledge in its weave. The twined stringybark has been looped into a dillybag weave by the artist that stretches across the cobalt-blue watery expanse, evoking notions of fluidity and visceral connections between cultures.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/631

Originally conceived for display at Sydney International Airport’s arrivals forecourt, Judy Watson’s walama 2000 draws its title from the Eora Nation’s word for ‘return’, and speaks to a shared understanding of the importance of returning to Country. The bronze sculptures reference upturned dillybags and the tall termite forms found in Watson’s Country in north-west Queensland.

Ranging from 40 centimetres to 1.8 metres in height, the bronze sculptures are displayed in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Watermall as if floating upon water. Each moulded form is distinct in form and colour, as though each vessel holds stories of place and time.

Woven details on some of the dillybag forms were inspired by Watson’s consultation with Aboriginal women, including Susan Marawarr, who she had met and worked with in Maningrida, Northern Territory. Watson had previously curated an exhibition, ‘Bush Colour’, of these artists’ prints and drawings that travelled to the Northern Territory University, where Watson was teaching.

Judy Watson’s inspiration for resistance pins 2018 extends to an iconic feminist of early 1900s Brisbane, and proves that size does not equal power:

I was inspired by the story of Emma Miller, an early campaigner for equal opportunity for women in the workplace. On Black Friday’s general strike in 1912, Emma Miller and her colleagues were at a rally in King George Square, Brisbane. The Police Commissioner [William Geoffrey] Cahill led a charge of mounted police straight toward the contingent of women. Emma, a seamstress by trade aged 73, stepped forward and used her hat pin to protect herself and the other women, piercing the horse and unseating the Police Commissioner. The charge was abandoned and Emma’s courage and conviction are remembered in the hearts and minds of the community.

In response, Watson made the work resistance pins 2018. Instead of a hat pin, the artist referenced traditional bone, wood and shell implements, such as an Aboriginal awl (needle) and a woman’s digging stick.These were remade into a series of bronze and porcelain objects. Seemingly delicate and far removed from Western heroic bronze sculptures, they stand as powerful symbols of resistance, both for women and Aboriginal culture. As the artist says of these forms, which she has portrayed in various media:

Their elegant, slender shapes conceal their ability to bind and sew, drill and pierce through material and the body, dig into the earth, fight, resist an attack or knock over a catch of fresh food.