Watson’s artist book under the act 2007 was developed through her research into the Queensland State Archives, Brisbane, which unearthed government documents that refer to her great-grandmother Mabel Daley and grandmother Grace Isaacson (pictured with Joyce Watson, Judy’s mother, on the cover of the artist book). These documents produced by the Department of Native Affairs float across the wash representing the blood of Aboriginal people. These works honour Watson’s matrilineal lineage and invite viewers to bear witness to policies designed to systemically separate Indigenous Australians from human rights, culture and Country.

In an overt display, 40 pairs of blackfellows ears, lawn hill station 2008, Watson references a diary entry of 8 February 1883 by Emily Caroline Creaghe, who recorded her visit to Lawn Hill Station on Waanyi Country. Here she witnessed a macabre scene: ‘40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed around the walls, collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks’. By executing the artwork as a simple rendition of that spectacle — as a wall-based installation of cast wax ears — Watson shares its horror and brutality.

From a distance, viewers may be intrigued to find out what these small forms are, but on closer inspection the sheer gruesome nature of these human trophies becomes clear. Each ear has been cast from colleagues, friends and family of the artist, created with the assistance of Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce.

For burnt shield 2002, Watson primed the canvas before placing it onto the blackened earth — the canvas coloured by the soil it lay upon. As she explains:

I coated the canvas in acrylic binder medium and placed it sticky-side down onto the blackened ground. The landscape is different, the termite mounds, the grasses and bush is different. After a ‘burn-off’, everything green sprouts really quickly.5

Later in her studio, Watson added the white shield image, a dual reference to her Indigenous and European heritage. The delicate white line work emulates the fine-line carving technique found on Aboriginal shields from the Central Desert and north-western and western Queensland. The shape of the shield is also reminiscent of the coat of arms of various European families encountered on the artist’s travels in Italy. Watson uses this image as an ironic signifier of her dual heritage. The triangular shield form also refers to the pubis area of the female body, signifying both female sexuality and the developing life of a child in the womb.

5. Judy Watson, conversation with Avril Quaill, 20 February 2003.

Judy Watson’s memory bones 2007 was created at the zenith of the political ferment surrounding the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island, and subsequent charging of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley with assault and manslaughter. Represented in this work are Mulrunji’s fractured ribs and blood, as he lay dying with fatal internal injuries in a cell within the police station.

In 1995–96, Watson visited the collections of the Horniman Museum, Science Museum, and Museum of Mankind, London, and museums in Cambridge and Oxford, while researching Aboriginal collections in British museums. Her visit raised questions about how the cultural material in these museums was acquired. our bones in your collections, our hair in your collections, and our skin in your collections 1997 reference the turmoil that confronts Indigenous people when they consider ancestral human remains in museum collections.

In her study of the objects in the museums, Watson wondered if those objects twined with human hair might include some of her own matrilineal ancestors’ hair. The relics that are etched in these prints come from the Gulf of Carpentaria, near Watson’s ancestral Country. They are based on her drawings of armbands, a head band, a fringed skirt, and a pituri bag used for the storing and trading of pituri (native tobacco).

The prints’ titles clearly refer to the macabre ethnocentric practice in Western anthropology of collecting and keeping human remains.

Watson’s moving-image work the names of places 2016 relies on research that expands the mapping of massacres across the continent. Stories handed down orally through generations are combined with data drawn from historical sources to portray the extent of frontier violence, in both numerical and geographical terms.

Waterways were often sites of massacres. Countless creeks, rivers, water holes, waterfalls, bays, bluffs and peaks still bear names that refer to the violent history of Australia’s frontier wars.

Watson’s series the holes in the land 2015 juxtaposes architectural plans of the British Museum, London, with silhouettes of selected Aboriginal Australian artefacts held within the institution. In these works, Watson seeks to understand how objects from Aboriginal culture have been taken and displaced in institutions that were built on colonial interests. In the four-plate etchings, Watson sees the floor plans of the British Museum as the bones of the work, washed with the blood of black bodies. Across this she floats shadows of Aboriginal cultural objects held within the Museum’s collections. The removal of the objects from Aboriginal Country has left a depression where those objects once rested.

Indigenous Arts and Culture Series: Judy Watson, Zimmerle Art Museum