This week on Let’s Talk – Black Arts, Rachael catches up with the extraordinary Waanyi artist, writer, researcher and activist Judy Watson. They reflect on Judy’s long career as an artist, and the process of bringing together works from across her life in the exhibition mundunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri, currently showing at the Queensland Art Gallery in Magan-djin, so-called brisbane. This extraordinary exhibition, which was curated by Katina Davidson, QAG’s curator of Indigenous Australian art, is organised around some of the central themes and concerns that have shaped Watson’s work: identity, colonial archives, gender, and land.
Judy Watson is, as the gallery puts it, “one of our most resolute and formidable storytellers — an artist who never falters in holding historical and present-day injustices to account.” The exhibition reflects Watson’s long-standing practice of “presencing” (McQuire 2021) Indigenous women, highlighting both the ongoing and specific brutality of colonisation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, as well as the incredible legacies of resistance, refusal, care, humour, resilience, and ingenuity through which Indigenous women have survived, sustained, and strengthened their families, communities, and cultures.
