Judy Watson is an Indigenous artist whose matrilineal family is from country in North West Queensland. She co-represented Australia in the 1997 Venice Biennale and won the Moet & Chandon Fellowship in 1995. Her work is held in major Australian and International collections including the National Gallery of Australia and all of the Australian State Art Galleries, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, St Louis Art Museum, US and The British Museum, London as well as important private collections. She has exhibited widely over the past twenty years. A major survey of works made from 1989-2003, sacred ground, beating heart, was exhibited at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, W.A. in 2003 and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2004. Asialink toured this exhibition in 2004 to Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Manila.
Read MoreJudy Watson has received major public art commissions including wurreka, a fifty metre etched zinc wall for the Melbourne Museum; walama forecourt, a sculptural installation of woven steel screens and upturned bronze dilly bags at Sydney International Airport and ngarrn-gi land/law, a fifty metre etched zinc wall at the Victorian County Court, Melbourne, and heart/land/river, at the Brisbane Magistrates Court. She is one of eight Indigenous artists who were commissioned to make work for the new Musee du Quai Branly in Paris which opened in 2006. Also in 2006, her artists book a preponderance of aboriginal blood was awarded the works on paper section at the 23rd NATSIA awards in Darwin, and she was the recipient of the 2006 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Text courtesy Tolarno Galleries.
