In & out of water: Judy Watson’s practice of painting

Mon 1 Jul 2024

Painting conservator Anne Carter met with Waanyi artist Judy Watson at her Yeronga studio to discuss Watson’s painting practices ahead of the exhibition ‘mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri’ (23 March – 11 August 2024). What resulted was an in-depth exploration of Watson’s approach to art-making across media — from printmaking, collage and photocopy to textile-dyeing, sculpture and painting — and the contributions of each to this extraordinary multi-decade practice.

Judy Watson ‘sacred ground beating heart’ 1989

Judy Watson’s painting practice is full of play and experimentation. Materials and processes have been collected through a lifetime of cultural and creative experiences. With a strong curiosity for mark-making, Watson often pushes a medium beyond its common use. Her paintings on canvas are characterised by their unstretched draping form, with soft and sometimes frayed edges. Pigments, ochres and dyes are pooled in background washes and overlayed with painted and stitched forms. Concerned with revealing concealed histories (of colonisation, place and the environment), these paintings are tender, seductive, and direct in their truth-telling. (‘Judy is a strong one’, says her mother, Joyce.)^[1]

Watson first explored painting as a young art student in Toowoomba in the late 1970s; however, as a process, painting felt unstructured. Printmaking offered her more defined strategies for the layering of thoughts and ideas. (Only later did she come to realise that these strategies could also be applied to the practice of painting.)^[2] Printmaking introduced a range of materials and processes, including grinding powdered pigments into different oils to make etching ink, and the effects of water in processes of lithography and etching. After a large work on paper was torn by the wind, Watson thought about using canvas as a more resilient large-scale painting substrate. From handmade papers and torn-edge photocopy techniques (Watson recalls discovering that tearing paper instead of cutting a straight edge could make the collaged edges disappear when photocopied), her love of irregular edges developed and was taken up in the floating forms of canvas:

There’s something really beautiful about the handmade . . . like a tenderness, and vision is not blinkered by the hard edge.^[3]

Watson has described her paintings as starting with play. Preparation can involve ‘dancing on the canvas’ — laying it down on plastic, tipping water and dancing to wash away the yellow-coloured size applied by the manufacturer. This can be a big job when numerous large canvases are being prepared for exhibition. Floating washes of colour suspended in diluted acrylic medium might then be poured over the flat canvas to ‘cling to every fold and hollow’.^[4]Alternatively, friends and family can be invited to dance, push and tramp dry media, such as charcoal, into the fibres. Other times, blueprints made from shibori (indigo) and natural dye processes are used to form background layers.

In this way processes are inclusive and performative. There are often family and other artist colleagues involved in preparing canvases. Watson likens the canvases to ‘skins’; handling them, sitting on them, draping them over chairs and her shoulders, eating her lunch on them and giving them a life and a history even before the layering of media begins.^[5]

Watson’s use of media has evolved through this playful experimentation. A review of her first solo exhibition in 1988, describes the use of printmaking materials (acrylic mediums, bitumen, oil and shellac) to make paintings on paper.^[6] Materials ranging from pigments in acrylic mediums and pastels, to ‘charcoal from a hungi, volcanic earth, artichoke liquid, tree gums’,^[7]indigo dyes and natural printing techniques made their way into her canvas paintings.

Judy Watson Details of ‘sacred ground beating heart’ 1989

In 1989, she was awarded a residency at Griffith Artworks in Brisbane. It was during this period that she painted sacred ground beating heart 1989 (illustrated) — a large work executed on cotton duck canvas. Most compelling is the central form, applied in a thick, heavily worked dark media which she has then sprinkled with pigment and dusted with powdered gold. Much of the canvas is overlayed with mesmerising spirals of orange pastel.

At that stage, I had some money. I went to Oxlades and bought up all this stuff including pigments. [At the studio] there were shelves, and I felt it was like a shop and I could put everything up and just play. Things like bitumen, shellac — all of those things I was familiar with from printmaking — and the new pigments — the idea of sprinkling with them, rubbing pigment in. I had made work on canvas and hessian before, but then I was suddenly really going for it.^[8]

Watson has continued to collect materials, recalling during her 1992 Italian residency the joy of buying beautiful individual pigments wrapped in pyramids of newspaper. In Paris in 1995, during her Moët and Chandon fellowship, Watson explored the amazing ranges of pigments available, as well discovering large bolts of linen and canvas, encouraging her work to move to a larger scale.^[9]

Judy Watson ‘burnt shield’ (& detail) 2002

Not only are materials embedded with memories and history, but her working practice can impress topographies of place on to the canvas surface. Watson recalls starting the traveller 1994 in Rajasthan the local hardware store and markets in Jaipur. An imprint of the courtyard tiles where she had laid the very thin (Indian portrait painting) cotton canvas support to be painted can be seen on its surface. Created when Watson was back in Australia and living in Darwin, burnt shield 2002 (illustrated) contains a layer of ash and charcoal embedded in a clear coating on raw canvas. To make the work, clear acrylic medium was applied to the raw canvas, which — while still wet and sticky — was laid face down on an area that had been burnt:

I really worked it and sort of pushed my feet into it and then pulled it up and it stuck. So, it’s basically like taking a monoprint of that surface.^[10]

Judy Watson ‘memory bones’ (& detail) 2007

Watson made memory bones 2007 (illustrated) while listening to radio reports of the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island.^[11] In this painting, blue pigment washes are worked into the background and a large splash of red ochre is pooled through the centre. Paper stencils were used to position the white forms by drawing the shapes onto paper, cutting them out, sticking them down with blue tape then tracing around them with white water-soluble pencil. Fine pencil outlines can still be seen around some forms. Making this work in a space with a mezzanine balcony (at The Edge, State Library of Queensland) was perfect for viewing the work on the floor from above. ‘I did a lot of running up and down to look at and rearrange the compositions.’^[12]

Water is a touchstone for Watson, and she has talked about its significance and power to encourage deep responses.^[13] In her practice, water is also a powerful solvent, dissolving and depositing media and leaving everything in its wake as it dries, like the tide going out. Part of the creative joy of working with water in this way is that results can’t be controlled exactly.

I dissolve pigment in water . . . I dance on water, I splash water around . . . I’m constantly in and out of water when I’m making work . . . Waanyi people — our cultural language group — are known as running water people and I know that I think very deeply in water.^[14]

Judy Watson ‘moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram’ (& detail) 2022

Differing to the washes of pigmented blue underlayers of memory bones, the background of moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram 2022 (illustrated) is blue indigo dye, made in a process of shibori. Influenced by her sister Lisa’s shibori-dyeing in the 1980s, today Watson works with her cousin Dorothy Watson, family and colleagues.^[15]

For the shibori process, canvases are laid flat and materials are placed on top — plants, ropes, food bags — nothing is wasted. The canvas is rolled up with the materials and tightly bound. In the dye process, points of pressure isolate the canvas from the dye — another form of resistance — leaving reverse shadows and shapes.^[16]

To dry it we lay it along fences and around garbage bins and over chairs and it’s to really get that vibrancy of water — the wash of it and the way that it goes through different passages of time.^[17]

Loving to work with shadows, Watson then pins the painted and dyed canvases to her studio wall and projects narrative elements. These are traced with a pencil and painted with acrylic washes.^[18] She understands that the seduction in her paintings comes not so much from the materials themselves, but from the combination of them.

I think it’s the layering. When I see things, it’s not always the obvious thing that stays with me. I think it’s making something that gives you something back, whether it’s a nourishment or it could be a repulsion . . . for me it’s things where there’s a bit of disquiet there — there’s a conversation going.^[19]

Thank you, Judy, for the conversation.

Anne Carter is Conservator (Paintings), QAGOMA
This text is adapted from an essay first published in QAGOMA’s Members’ magazine, Artlines

mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson / Gallery 3 (Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Gallery), Gallery 4 & Watermall, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) / 23 March – 11 August 2024

The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country. It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

Endnotes

1. ^ ‘Judy Watson – Artists are Strange Creatures’ [interview], TATE, London, TateShots, https://www.youtube.com/
   watch?v=HDmH8gme2XU, viewed 14 November 2023.
   
2. ^ Judy Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter at the artist’s Yeronga studio, 26 October and 12 November 2023.
   
3. ^ Judy Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter at the artist’s Yeronga studio, 26 October and 12 November 2023.
   
4. ^ Julie Ewington, ‘Water’, in sacred ground beating heart: works by Judy Watson 1989–2003 [exhibition catalogue], John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth, 2003, pp.44–54.
   
5. ^ Museum of Brisbane (date unknown), Wendy Love and Louise Martin-Chew, ‘Where I belong: Episode 9 – Judy Watson’, https://www.museumofbrisbane.com.au/judywatson/, viewed 15 November 2023.
   
6. ^ Helen Waterer, ‘Judy Watson’, Eyeline, no.9, 1989, pp.35–6.
   
7. ^ See Judy Watson and Louise Martin-Chew, Judy Watson, blood language, Miegunyah Press, Vic., 2009.
   
8. ^ Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter, October/November 2023.
   
9. ^ Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter, October/November 2023.
   
10. ^ Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter, October/November 2023.
    
11. ^ Watson discusses memory bones, QAGOMA, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNZRNSLLR84, viewed 14 November 2023.
    
12. ^ Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter, October/November 2023.
    
13. ^ Watson in conversation with Daniel Browning: ‘In the Frame: Judy Watson on landscape, language and memory’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 11 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p2o_ZGjrpw, viewed 15 November 2023.
    
14. ^ ‘Judy Watson Interview’, IKON Gallery, 20 March 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrbz5Sl6Abs, viewed 14 November 2023.
    
15. ^ Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter, October/November 2023.
    
16. ^ ‘Judy Watson – Artists are Strange Creatures’ [interview], TATE, London, TateShots, https://www.youtube.com/
    watch?v=HDmH8gme2XU, viewed 14 November 2023.
    
17. ^ Judy Watson, ‘clouds and undercurrents’, 2021, https://www.the-national.com.au/artists/judy-watson/clouds-andundercurrents/, viewed 15 November 2023.
18. ^ Museum of Brisbane (date unknown), Wendy Love and Louise Martin-Chew, ‘Where I belong: Episode 9 – Judy Watson’, https://www.museumofbrisbane.com.au/judywatson/, viewed 15 November 2023.
    
19. ^ Watson, in conversation with Anne Carter, October/November 2023.