Shards

Corrosion is at the core of things, that process that once begun seems to accelerate towards dissolution, the reduction of things to their fundamental forms. The elemental is here everywhere in evidence, black carbon, rusty ochres, bloody ink, the crusty surfaces, the tearing of paper and the salt crystals heaped in tidal lines along the cool concrete floor.

A large ochre form is crusted on the floor, an unhealed wound its’ centre heaped with bright salt crystals, a fragile ti tree fence (shelter, hide?) hangs nearby in a sinuous curve, on the wall next to it wax ears (cast from life) are pinned with galvanised nails to the wall, the connections between these elements tenuous but potent, unmistakable, Judy Watson’s salt in the wound could be our corrosive core; blood, rust and brutality rendered in powdery ochre and soft wax.

For the artists in Shards, Judy Watson, Yhonnie Scarce and Nici Cumpston fragmentation becomes not breakage but a loosing of bonds and an examination of the spaces revealed, a productive process of reconstruction. These elementals of colour and texture, of the organic processes of growth and entropy in the work resonate and reflect, building a web of multiplying interconnections and opening up spaces and pathways for this accretion of meanings.

Watson’s artist’s book, a preponderance of aboriginal blood, shown as sixteen etchings uses archival material on the aboriginal protection system exploring these systems of bureaucratic control over Indigenous people and the complex classifications of proportions of aboriginal and white blood that lay at its core. The etchings are quiet, stained with bloody ink, the work shocking in the absolute matter-of-factness of systemic oppression; the use of “breed” on forms to refer to indigenous people, the casual arrogance of an official who simply cannot understand why an indigenous woman excepted from the protection act might think this entitles her to vote. Reading the work is an oppressive experience, the ink almost obscures the text in some cases forcing the viewer into an uneasily close intimacy, it feels like entrapment, smothering in layers of paper. Watson’s use of the chine colle process is refined and potent layering and binding the language of control to the base body and overlaying this with the red ink that seeps and stains exposing the fear of the irruptive other that drives this need for classification and control.