Judy Watson:
the skin
of painting
VAULT examines the work of Judy Watson, whose new projects embody the artist’s collaborative and multi-faceted approach to presenting contemporary and historical narratives of trauma and dispossession.
Image credit: Judy Watson, the skin of painting (video stills), 2021, single channel video 00:07:30, Editor: Joshua Maguire, Sound: Ross Manning, Dancers: Emma Holgate and Otis Carmichael, Camera: Based Productions, Otis Carmichael, Judy Watson and Carl Warner. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Previewing Judy Watson’s new video, the skin of painting (2021), in the artist’s studio recently was an uncanny experience. In the seven-minute digital work, a camera slowly pans over a male and a female figure, together performing a sort of improvised choreography. The work was filmed in a series of abandoned industrial spaces in and around Watson’s studio, located within a decommissioned paint factory in Brisbane’s inner south, an extraordinary site comprising a sprawling mix of cavernous warehouses alongside more intimate spaces.
The complex has proven fertile ground for Watson, who shares the space with some of Brisbane’s leading artists – when VAULT visited the studio, ‘neighbours’ Dale Harding and Gordon Hookey had dropped in for a cup of tea and a chat. Indeed, the video includes footage shot outside Harding’s studio, as well as images of Sandra Selig’s spirograph-like ‘salt drawings’, which the artist makes on the floor of her studio in an adjacent warehouse. These are interspersed with graphs plotting the spread of COVID-19 and microscopic images of the virus.
Watson says that she wanted to document the extraordinary moment of a global pandemic through the studio space, connecting it to what was happening in the outside world. “The studio becomes a microcosm of broader issues.” In casting her son Otis and his partner Emma to dance in the video, Watson explains that she “wanted to inject youth and energy into the space, but also the idea of infection, of them . ...Subscribe to read this article in full
