Waitemara & Waimā Forest

Deep in the forest of Te Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe is a community of place and people who know the land. This body of work, developed over ten days at St Isaac’s Retreat, explores the forest through painting, prayer, and walking.

“Watson's paintings are enigmatic. They seem to solicit interpretation with the same quiet insistence that stymies it… In a way, each of Watson's paintings is somehow two paintings at once: rigorously abstract and generically connected to the land, yet also haunted by feelings, memories and reverberations that may be profoundly subjective and therefore private, and in part incommunicable. Art-historically, one is no longer tempted to think of a landscape painter like Woollaston; the mystery of Watson's painting now lies even less in its strangeness, even more in its ordinariness. - [An excerpt from “The Lie of the Land”, by Laurence Simmons. Art New Zealand, 109/Winter 2024, p59-63. 2024.]

Residency

1-10th September 2026

Installation at St Isaac’s

March 2027

Exhibition

2027

Images

1.      A drawing made in the forest, charcoal on paper.

2.       A painting being made in the forest, canvas, tape, plastic, and trees.

3.       A painting being transported out of the forest.