Previous Exhibition

Carolyn V Watson —
Pressure Points

May 21 – May 30, 2026

About the Artist      

Side Gallery is pleased to present Pressure Points, a new exhibition by represented artist Carolyn V Watson.

Playful in intent yet grounded in lived experience, Pressure Points by Carolyn V Watson departs from the heaviness of earlier career work. The ambiguity of hybrid chimera forms remains, and the burden of unspoken tension has shifted. In its place is a quiet assertion of self-reliance—an insistence on testing the limits of skill, endurance and perception. Beneath the work is an acceptance of limitation without surrender; a recognition of constraint as something to negotiate rather than resist. These works are not only points of pressure, but points of transition: acts of reclamation that transform endurance into agency.

Experience Carolyn V Watson’s upcoming exhibition from Thursday, 21 May to Saturday, 30 May 2026.

Artwork Notes

Pressure Points Jessica McNicol

There’s nothing quite like a body of work from Carolyn V Watson. Like a time-lapse life cycle, Watson’s practice presents as a bizarre genus of lazarus organisms that stylistically pendulum back and forth between imagery of new life — fleshy and organic — to the dry solemnity of reliquary bones.

After a monumental run of back-to-back solo exhibitions throughout Queensland and Tasmania, followed by a well-earned hiatus, Watson has returned, regenerated, and renewed. The pendulum has swung, life has found a way (as the saying goes) and her current body of work — Pressure Points — is once again the image of softly blooming biology.

Appropriating a palette of purplish rot and bacterial bloom (respectfully), the work in Pressure Points sprouts from walls and plinths, incomprehensibly growing from the white walls of the gallery. It’s a grand return for Watson’s fantastic arcana, and in this collection her abundance of sculpture, expanded painting, and assemblage bubbles with shimmering, larval energy.

Previously, I have described Watson’s ‘fleshier’ work as sensual, suggestive — pink and white and delicate. If this was the case — the work in Pressure Points can only be described as ripe. Her familiar cocoons, scales and polymer buds have fruited, and works such as Phantom limb feels (Sceptre 1) and The wait of the crack (Sceptre 2) hark back to the delicate yet staff-like objects in the The shared comfort of uncertainty collection. These artefacts seemingly re-appear here, mulchy and colonised by purplish turkey tails and the reaching fingers of cordyceps.

She’s enlarged the scale of her trademark branching antlers, with four such works seemingly grafted from the imposing white mushroom of Where did you go and where are you now. She’s deepened surface textures, and her familiar beaded surfaces swell and glisten from fold and crevice in pearls and bloody pinks.

There’s typically a nuanced sense of autobiography to Watson’s practice, and anyone who knows her personally wouldn’t be surprised that this is exactly the way she would process a much needed break from the exhaustive demands of the past few years.

When I asked if this was her menopause show Watson laughed it off. It’s not — but it could be. Although the visual language is unmistakable in its authorship, Pressure Points thematically reflects the unstoppable biological imperative and organic decay. In As though the body could become a shrine (Sweet baby Shiv) Watson actually exposes the face of a doll — for once not shrouded or structural — her serene features are surprisingly stern in spite of the light rose in the cheeks. She sits atop the collection’s only authentic bone — a broken antler cum shiv protruding from her porcelain pelvis. It’s blatant and raw, and it comes across as Watson’s little joke.

Little One and The Long Keeping sees the artist return to another familiar motif — the double headed pig — here in its third iteration. Janus-like, this version’s clouded pearl eyes and embellished fleshy snouts turn heavenward, away from their girlish lace skirts, while delicate, seeking dolls hands reach towards their mirrored likeness — physically limited moments from a real connection.

For all its varicose hues and themes of decay, Pressure Points — despite the name, is light hearted. It seems like Watson’s had fun here, allowing metaphor to take the reins from her usual serious material symbolism. Made from scratch with construction materials more common to prop making and prototyping, Watson’s new works are almost entirely synthetic, and the change away from her usual process — driven by reverence and material scarcity — has given her license to be playful, up the scale, and take more risks.

Conversely — this switch to synthetic materials has allowed Watson the ability to create shared connection between many of the works in this collection — while some remain unseen (the shared parts of a fallow deer form) others appear to grow on the surface — mycelial networks that mirror their organic subject matter. Many of the works here are delicately edged in glow in the dark pigment, and while this phosphorescence most readily reads as the language of exotic fungi — borne of decay — Watson gleefully confirms that it was more girlish play — directly referenced from the plastic rooftop galaxies of a curious youth.

Perhaps the most experimental works in the whole collection, Watson’s series of expanded paintings and the exciting, amorphous growths of Body Rubble best embody Pressure Point’s conceptually recursive ecosystem. These works are created entirely from offcuts, in each case their petri dish palette and organic contours exist as a reanimation of waste material from the construction of the larger works. Body Rubble’s multitude of amorphous forms are all excised bulbs of expanding foam. Deceptively organic, it’s as if each sinewy globule dropped to the floor of the studio and began to take on a life of its own, eventually harvested from the rich undergrowth of Watson’s imagined ecosystem. While the series of painted panels appear coalesced from junk timber, their rough hewn compositions concealing conical growths that sprout from hidden crevices in their surfaces — yet they seem fresh, mottled, and fleshy despite their contemporary geometries.

It could be a neat coincidence that Watson’s experimental materiality has become an embodiment of recursive ecology, but it’s unlikely that someone who thinks so deeply, and responds to intuitively be in the dark about the complexity of her own practice. In any case, Pressure Points more than any of her previous collections has convinced me to imagine her studio as a self-sustaining biome fuelled by a simulacra of life, death and regeneration befitting her obsession with the mirrored worlds of the psychological and corporeal.

About the Artist

Carolyn V Watson

For over 20 years, Carolyn V Watson has used her art practice to comprehend and chronicle her life history and experiences. Primarily self-taught, Watson was initially committed to an intense drawing and painting practice before experimenting with three-dimensional making to expand her art and her private ruminations. In contrast to the purposeful looseness and immediacy of her drawings, Watson’s sculptural responses make explicit the contemplative and multilayered nature of her work. Drawn to a grotesque feminine aesthetic, she employs labour-intensive methods such as hand-stitching, carving, moulding and assemblage to draw out physical embodiments of her deep thought processes and highlight connections between her inner world, her home environment, and the natural world. Cornerstones might include personal memory, natural history, gothic imagery, or the lush and unruly garden surrounding her studio.

Watson shifts between two and three-dimensional modes while working, resulting in bodies of work with distinct rhythms that repeat, echo and mimic reference points throughout. Totemic and ritualistic, they exist in the indeterminate space between the familiar and the foreign, the natural and the human-made.
 
Carolyn V Watson is an alum of the Queensland College of Art. Highly Commended in the inaugural 2021 Lethbridge Landscape Prize and a dual finalist in the 2020 Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture, she has won multiple awards at the Brisbane Sculpture Festival (2019, 2018, 2017, 2016) and Brisbane Rotary Art Spectacular (Won – 2016, Finalist – 2017), and been a finalist in numerous awards including the Moreton Bay Regional Art Awards (2019, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2011); the Marie Ellis OAM Drawing Prize (2015, 2013, 2010); the Prometheus Visual Art Award (2011, 2009) and the Lethbridge 10000 Small Scale Art Award (2015), the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2012) and the John Fries Memorial Art Prize (2012). Included in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in 2008, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia since 2006.



About the Curator

Laura Brinin

Laura Brinin is a curator of contemporary art, currently facilitating the vibrant program at Side Gallery in the heart of Red Hill, Brisbane. With an unwavering passion for nurturing connections with emerging and established creatives, Laura is dedicated to fostering artistic growth through avenues such as social media, branding, and identity development.

Laura has exhibited her own work both in Australia and overseas, as well as working as an independent freelance curator across Brisbane for over ten years. In her downtime, you can find her reading, travelling, or stalking dogs.