‘When I made salt in the wound in 2008/09, it was very much that shape. It is the open wound with the salt in it, which comes down through generations. A trans-generational trauma throughout history and our families.'4

salt in the wound 2008/09 is a symbolic installation that tells a story of survival and reveals the realities of intergenerational trauma. The work honours Watson’s great-great-grandmother Rosie who hid behind a windbreak to escape a massacre by troopers. Rosie, only a young girl at the time, was bayoneted by troopers but managed to escape, along with another girl, by using rocks to submerge themselves beneath the water, using reeds to breathe through.

Watson’s installation uses leaves and branches to represent the windbreak, ochre to symbolise the shape of the wound her great-great-grandmother carried throughout her life, and salt to signify the intergenerational trauma caused by this near-fatal act. The unreconciled historic injustice perpetrated by a nation continues to reverberate through the psyche of Watson’s family.

4. Judy Watson, quoted in Paola Bella, ‘The names of places: A conversation with Judy Watson’, RMIT Gallery, viewed October 2023.

water, light, reeds (wanami, mabibarr, bulinja) 2019 is a hauntingly beautiful work painted from an underwater perspective, depicting glimmering sunlight on the water’s surface and visual noise occurring above ground. Watson has also drawn inspiration for this painting imbued with memories from the Ukiyo-e genre of Japanese art. Popularised with the advent of printmaking in the eighteenth century, Ukiyo-e prints are known for their evocative layers of colour applied to the paper using multiple woodblocks.

The perspective of looking up to light refracted through water invites an empathetic reading of Rosie’s story of survival as a moment of sensory stillness, danger and awe. In the bottom corner of the painting, Watson has included direct reference to the reeds that her great-great-grandmother and the girl, who hid with her, used to breathe through.

grandmother’s song 2007 was made shortly after the death of Watson’s grandmother, Grace Isaacson. Deeply personal and elusive, the painting conveys feelings of grief, longing and admiration for a woman who played a pivotal role in her development as a person and artist.

The painting features ghostly elements — a feminine form floating in water, a bailer shell, pulsating and energising whorls, and native vegetation — allowing Watson to release her grandmother back to Waanyi Country.

Through paint and pigment, Judy Watson evokes the pulse of the earth, heat, air and moisture — geographic emblems of her heartland. These allusions link with Aboriginal references to totemic beings or ancestral guardians who metamorphose into landscape features, such as hills, rocks and termite mounds, and who continue to manifest their presence as meteorological or astral phenomena.

In passing from the edge of memory to the night sky 2007, successive waves of blue and indigo overlap to form an intense colour field. This work imagines the night sky as seen from Waanyi Country in north-west Queensland, the homeland of Judy Watson’s matrilineal family.

The celestial blue plane is visited by a transitory veiled figure ascending into the sky. Watson often uses silhouetted figures in her paintings to recall those found in both painted and engraved rock art sites throughout Australia. This device refers to the continued Aboriginal presence embodied in land, water and sky, and suggests a kind of spiritual power.

The painting is a tribute to Watson’s grandmother and an evocation of how you must surrender a loved one to the wider universe. It also acknowledges the Coroner’s report on the violent death of Aboriginal resident of Palm Island Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004 while in police custody. Watson was listening to the media coverage of this report when she painted this work.

In homage to the matriarchy, Watson has painted large-scale profiles of family members, including her daughter Rani Carmichael, mother Joyce Watson and sister Lisa Watson. These depictions aim to capture the essence of the sitter as well as their likeness and are akin to historic Renaissance portraiture, bronze bust sculptures, or, more commonly, depictions of the monarchy on Australian currency.

In these works, Watson has embedded her family into their homelands, capturing a moment in time.