2020 IB Extended Essays

Michael Cook; rewriting an Indigenous perspective of history. Contemporary artists like these individuals continue to tell stories through their works as statements of cultural endurance and as personalised expressions to a tragic and convoluted history. Judy Watson Judy Watson uses her artwork to reveal hidden histories of the Indigenous peoples and explore her connection with the land of her grandmother, the Waanyi people of north-east Queensland. Watson has spent much of her career delving into family histories in an attempt to understand and preserve her ancestry as an Indigenous person. In her findings she discovered that her great great grandmother, a Waanyi woman, escaped a massacre by hiding underwater and breathing through reeds. Her great grandmother ran from government authorities as they pursued her to take her children. When her grandmother was eventually removed from her family, she was brutally forced to assimilate into white Australia at five years old. Watson has fused these shards of a tragic and burdensome family history in the production of her personal and unique bodies of work ( Judy Watson: The Collection: Art Gallery NSW, 2014 ). Analysis of Artist Examples

Watson does not hide from the violence and ongoing injustices that have afflicted

Aboriginals ever since white settlement. In her collection, ‘our bones in your

collections, our hair in your collections and our skin in your collection’ (1997), stories

of her grandmothers’ lives are retold as Watson deals with the systematic dispossession and institutionalisation of Indigenous people.