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In 2016 Judy Watson may well have had the busiest year of her career. She launched ngarunga nangama, calm water dream, a major new public artwork at 200 George Street, Sydney, prepared two solo commercial exhibitions (Milani Gallery, Brisbane and Tolarno, Melbourne), and exhibited work in exhibitions in Australia and overseas (Harvard, Monaco, and Utrecht). Her work also has been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in partnership with the Tate Gallery, London. This line up of exhibitions, public art commissions and international opportunities was topped off by the announcement of her selection for the Queensland Indigenous Public Art Commission, to be in place for the tenth anniversary celebrations of Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art in December 2016.
Watson is an artist at the peak of her powers, but this does not suggest the fulfilment of her potential: she has an uncanny ability to rise to a challenge. Approached early in 2016, Watson created, for TarraWarra Museum of Art, an exhibition/installation titled the scarifier. TarraWarra (established 2000) is a privately funded, public art museum located in the Yarra Valley outside Melbourne, on a property which also hosts a working winery. The purpose-built gallery, which opened in 2003, houses a collection of major Australian paintings acquired by Marc and Eva Besen.
In 2016, director Victoria Lynn and curator Anthony Fitzpatrick curated Panorama, an exhibition responding to the strength of landscape paintings in the TarraWarra collection, and influenced by the environment within which the gallery is situated. Judy Watson’s commission to create work that referred to the local landscape and its Indigenous histories sat adjacent to Panorama (such a large show that it was mounted in two