'Mound' (pigment pastel aquarelle chinagraph pencil on canvas) 2001
Judy Watson (Australia) is a descendant of the Waanyi Aboriginal people of the Gulf region of NW Queensland. "As the sentimental traveller collects riverstones or dried leaves to pocket an experience of place, so Watson incorporates into her work fragments or elements of the landscape. Some of these natural souvenirs are unintentional: one finds tiny dried leaves or tufts of grass stuck to the front or back of the canvases, poignant reminders in the modern art gallery's pristine environment of the messy raggedness of the land which the images describe. Her paintings are sometimes made outside the studio in situ, the organic inflections of the picture surface made by laying the canvas on the ground and rubbing ochres and oxides into its corrugated surface with her hands, or by floating washes of pigment over the canvas which dry in a moulded impression of the ground beneath."
Extract " from the ground up" Hannah Fink 1996
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