suture

Judy Watson creates abstract paintings by building up layers of colors, marks, and images, starting with powdered pigments worked into the canvas. In this painting, spiraling red strokes float above dark clouds of blue and green, then give way to an opening at top left. White stitches at bottom right evoke passages and levels of a mine, a reference to industrial resource extraction in the homeland of the Waanyi, her grandmother’s people. The spirals, tonal layers, and evocation of mining create a sense of movement between surface and depth, formally echoing the artist’s overriding conceptual interest in excavating colonial histories in Australia. Watson, who is of Aboriginal and European ancestry, studied fine arts at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Monash University in Melbourne. She is a member of the first generation of Aboriginal artists to employ the conventions of a studio-based fine art practice to examine contemporary identity and historical trauma. Watson uses abstract patterns to tell stories of land, not from the Dreamtime but rather from recent Aboriginal memory and experience.