Title

Sacred ground.

Author

Author not identified

Source

[Not applicable]

Type

About the work

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Sacred ground.
by Judy Watson

This lithograph was part of a body of work that I made in 1989 when I was artist-in-residence at Griffith Artworks, Griffith University, Brisbane. At the end of the residency I had an exhibition titled A sacred place for these bones.

The residency was to an extent the beginning of my full-time career because it was the first time I was paid to be an artist. It was also the first time I had a large studio all to myself and the time to just do my own work. It was fantastic. The printmaking facilities were well equipped and I spent long hours in the lithographic studio which was set in a beautiful bush environment.

Sacred ground was one of a series of small lithographs that I made during those four months of the residency. It relates to connections with country, particularly my  Grandmother’s country in north-west Qld. At the bottom there is a rectangular black shape holding a spear. The spear is from Riversleigh Station where my Grandmother was born.  I made a drawing of the stone-headed spear at the Qld Museum, where it is housed in the collections. The black rectangle surrounding the spear represents a fictitious velvet-lined case. I felt a strange contradiction seeing the spear from my Grandmother’s birth-place in an alien environment where it becomes a collector’s item, carefully preserved.

Yet I also appreciate that I can access this material that connects me back with my Grandmother and with country.

There is a central form illuminated by a scatter of light, I was trying to evoke the presence of my Grandmother, the matrilineal link I have with my Aboriginal heritage, my ancestors, our country. The spiralling patterns evoke dust storms, energy, heat, haze, change. The intimacy of the scale of the work was dictated by the series of small lithographic stones that I drew on. The uneven outside shape of the image echoes the edge of the stone.

©  Judy Watson, 12 February 2002.