The unstretched canvas of sacred ground beating heart 1989 simultaneously suggests an aerial perspective of parched land, a vague visualisation of distant memory, and the materialisation of ancestral emotion. Watson creates a velvety, sensuous surface stained by layers of wet and dry pigment, which is then marked by urgent touches of colour. The darkened central form appears to hover within air currents or shimmering heat, punctuated by a tremulous surface of spiralling dust particles and flanked on the left by a circular stone arrangement. Watson writes of her Country:

when you walk in that country 
        the earth is beating, pulsating
                          heat, blood, heart
        things are hidden
        like the bones of the people
                          who have been there before
        you are walking in their footprints