Judy Watson observes the advance of climate change in her painting moreton bay rivers, australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram 2022. A bird’s-eye view of Moreton Bay and its rivers are overlaid with a chart of Australia’s average air and water temperatures recorded between 1910 and 2019, tracking the increase in global warming.

Watson integrated the scientific data alongside a spectrogram (a visual recording of sound) in which Aunty Helena Gulash spoke the Kabbi Kabbi/Gubbi Gubbi language word ‘gila’, meaning native bee (light coloured). With artist Tor MacLean, Watson experimented with botanically dyed materials at Maleny. Some of these contained iron filings from her nephew and Tor’s partner Dan Watson’s knife-making practice. Some of these works on fabric were hung from trees in the Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Gardens in a group exhibition, ‘Final Call’, as part of the Horizon Festival in 2021. The pieces were then dyed in an indigo vat at her cousin Dorothy Watson’s home near the flood-prone Oxley Creek in Brisbane. Later this work was overlaid with painted imagery that included the shadowed forms of three freshwater mussel shells, known as malu malu in Watson’s Waanyi language, with cross-hatched lines symbolising a net.

By carrying the residue of mapped Country, transforming the sound of breath into a spectrogram and plotting scientific charts, Watson reminds us of climate change’s existential threat in south‑east Queensland.

See more about the ‘Final Call’ exhibition.

In sacred ground beating heart 1989, Judy Watson has stained the unstretched canvas with layers of wet and dry pigment, creating a velvety, sensuous surface that was then marked by touches of pastel. The imagery suggests an aerial perspective of parched land, distant memory, or emotion. As the artist wrote when visiting Waanyi Country in 1990:

when you walk in that country
the earth is beating pulsating heat, blood, heart
things are hidden
like the bones of the people who have been there before
you are walking in their footprints

Watson paints the traces of her Aboriginal family in Country, exploring issues such as heritage, identity and isolation. The work may represent the artist or an ancestral presence, even a guardian spirit. These references are intensely personal. In 1990, when Watson journeyed to her grandmother's birthplace in Waanyi Country, she wrote:

It was lovely taking Nan back to Riversleigh Station and to Lawn Hill Gorge. She found sugarbag and spinifex resin for us, and showed us all the other bush foods . . . My uncle showed us rock art, middens, burial sites and places where stone tools were lying all over the ground.

Judy Watson’s wanami 2019 weaves together earth and water — past, present and future — in layers of yellow ochre and blue pigment. Watson explains:

Water is a conduit for my creativity: I think through water, swimming, washing, showering, pouring and pooling washes of liquid paint onto my canvases and paper . . . When I am immersed in water, I feel connected and alive.

Long fibres of string float across the watery depths, delineated as if seen from beneath. Watson’s female ancestors wove string like this to wear as a body ornament, for woven items, or to use as fishing nets or fishing lines. Each length was rolled along the thigh, picking up hair, skin and sweat, adding ancestral DNA to the mix. wanami traces this genealogy as well as conjuring the Rainbow Serpent, Boodjamulla, the source of the life-giving waters (wanami) on Watson’s traditional Country.

The two white forms in the middle ground signify the melting bodies of water viewed by the artist in Japan. This global perspective demonstrates humanity’s universal relationship with water as a precious resource that can nourish life.

palm cluster 2007 is part of a body of work Judy Watson produced during a time of mourning time of mourning, when she was grieving the passing of her grandmother, Grace Isaacson. Also at this time, immense political unrest was engulfing the North Queensland Aboriginal community on Palm Island following the violent death of Mulrunji Doomadgee while held in police custody.

Watson had visited Palm Island in the mid-1980s. She recalls stingrays pushing against her legs as she walked along the coastline at low tide. Stingrays are usually solitary creatures that only come together to mate or migrate. The artist compounds her memory of Palm Island as a life-sustaining tropical-island paradise with symbolic references to ultramarine and Prussian blue to signify grieving, and vibrating red ochre to resonate with the death of Doomadgee and the bloody underbelly of Palm Island’s mission days.

In bloom 2009, Judy Watson maps the occurrence in March 2009 of an oil spill across the Moreton Bay region of south-east Queensland. Occurring soon after Watson’s Heron Island residency, she was mindful that if oil entered the freshwater lens that floats underneath sand and coral islands, it would contaminate their water supply. Moreton Bay’s natural beauty is a source of pride in the contemporary life of south-east Queensland. bloom highlights the risk of losing its most precious resource – healthy waterways.