Since the mid-80s Canterbury-born artist Ruth Watson has exhibited throughout New Zealand and internationally, producing a substantial body of artwork stemming from her interest in the histories and processes of cartography. A number of the artist’s works have only a temporary presence – she has made maps by pouring wine onto carpets, smearing plasticine onto walls, or icing a cake. The fragility and impermanence of these materials often evoke a sense of the elusiveness, even impossibility of arriving at any singular, authoritative world view.

Watson exhibited Au hasard, Unnerved, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2010; Entangled, Te Tuhi, Centre for the Arts, Manakau, 2008, and The (re)formed world, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2008. Other important exhibitions include Unsafe, Two Rooms, Auckland, 2007; Telecom Prospect, Wellington, 2004; Paradise Now?: Contemporary Art from the Pacific, Asia Society Museum, New York, 2004; The World Over, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1996, and The Boundary Rider, 9th Biennale of Sydney, 1992.

Site is a crucial element to many of the artist’s works, with environment and experience playing intrinsic roles in the planning of them. Watson attempts to transform the manner in which society identifies and defines experiential spaces. Watson’s 12-metre map of the universe, titled Between Light and Dark Matters, was installed in one of the ruined observatories outside Canberra in an area devastated by the 2003 bushfires. Between Light and Dark Matters carries a particular poignancy because, although installed at the Yale-Columbia Observatory – a place established to ‘view the heavens’ – the physical reality of the site was, at the time, completely incapacitated.