Moreton bay rivers, Australian temperature chart, freshwater mussels, net, spectrogram 2022

In this large-scale painting, Watson surveys the rising tide of climate change by representing a bird’s-eye view of Moreton Bay and its rivers, overlaid with a chart of Australia’s average air and water temperatures recorded between 1910 and 2019.

Watson integrated this data with the knowledges of women close to her. With her nephew’s partner, Tor Maclean, she experimented with botanical-dyeing and stencilling. Aunty Helena Gulash spoke the Kabi Kabi word ‘gila’, meaning ‘light coloured native bee’ — represented here in the form of a spectrograms (visual representations of recorded sound). At her mother Joyce Watson’s home, the artist painted the spectrograms, while at her cousin Dorothy Watson’s home in Oxley — close to the flood-prone Oxley Creek — she dyed the work in indigo.  

Three freshwater mussel shells, known as malu malu in Watson’s Waanyi language, are also represented in this work.