Watson Broadfoot (ollewats)
Watson Broadfoot’s practice explores surface, atmosphere and spatial tension through layered painting processes that combine accumulation, removal and revision. Built through sedimented layers and repeated reworking, the paintings retain traces of earlier gestures and material histories within the final surface.
Broadfoot works with restrained palettes, fractured divisions and dispersed points of focus to create works that balance stillness with instability. Figures, structural interruptions and shifting fields emerge and recede across the surface, functioning less as narrative elements than as forms of presence, weight and observation.
The works resist fixed interpretation, unfolding instead through subtle shifts in tone, texture and spatial balance. Through processes of erosion, concealment and recovery, Broadfoot’s paintings examine what remains visible, what is withheld, and how tension can be carried quietly within a surface.
Watson also collaborates with her partner from Melbourne
Geraldine Olle - hence the name “Ollewats”
Watson Broadfoot
Acrylic on Canvas
76cm x 101cm
A surface split but not resolved. Two fields hold in tension—one warmer, one receding—meeting at a narrow seam that resists closure. The work is built through sedimented layers that are applied, disturbed, and partially removed, allowing traces of earlier states to remain visible. The division is not fixed; it shifts as light moves across the surface, suggesting a boundary that is both structural and unstable. The painting sits in a held moment—quiet, but charged.