Here, there and everywhere

From the 1990s, she has participated in an array of projects, exhibitions and residencies in Europe, Asia, India and the US. Her art registers both tangible and intangible aspects of international experience: critical and professional success abroad appears in the artist’s exhibition record but also in an iconography of travel and work; and the emotional register of international experience is suggested in themes of separation from home, family and everyday life. Personal experience becomes a metaphor for the challenges of an international career, especially detachment from homeland and loss of national identity.

The exhibition will introduce dominant themes in the history of modern Australian culture: the impact of distance and isolation, the conflict between local and international identity, the positive and negative character of globalism, the potentially debilitating effects of expatriatism and cosmopolitanism. It will trace Watson’s efforts to construct a practice and a persona that allows a critical negotiation of the experience of being here, there and everywhere.