Artwork Information

Ruth Watson’s Tour of New Zealand seems to be an exercise in nostalgia: replicating a popular board game of the 1950s, it invites players to move through a succession of familiar tourist destinations. However, in Watson’s version, travelling this well-trodden path also means contending with a strange undergrowth of unsettling text. The surface of the painting peels back, as words like ‘unexplorable’ and ‘denied all legitimacy’ rise to the surface and begin seeping across the chocolate-box landscapes with their population of pink-skinned,

faceless people.