The work of Judy Watson 1989–2003
Judy Watson, a Waanyi woman from North West Queensland, began exhibiting in 1980—well before Koori or urban Aboriginal art were at all known. She is a veteran of the movement, and was included in some of the earliest urban Aboriginal art exhibitions, such as ‘Urban Aboriginal Artists’ (Contemporary Art Centre, Adelaide 1988) and ‘A Koorie Perspective’ (Artspace, Sydney). In the past decade she has exhibited widely, won major wards, such as the Moët & Chandon in 1995, and is represented in a large number of public and corporate collections. Yet she has not achieved the same critical presence as Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt, the two most acclaimed urban-based Aboriginal artists of her generation.
This first survey exhibition of Watson’s work at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth highlights the first twelve years of her career as a painter (it also includes some prints and other works). One would normally expect such an exhibition to reveal an emerging talent, a developing style. Instead it is a remarkably consistent practice and forceful vision. This is, no doubt, due to Watson having been a practicing artist (primarily a printmaker) for nearly a decade before she took to painting in 1989. Such is the force of her vision, however, that it seems to have no prehistory, as if it suddenly appeared fully formed from nowhere and took possession of the artist. Her art, then, does not trace a shifting subjectivity, but addresses something other and bigger than her. In this respect it recalled Brian Blanchflower’s exhibition held in the same gallery the previous year, another artist from whose work critics shy away. This too was a survey mainly of paintings done in the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline