Walu takes its name from a rockhole in the artist's own country, one of the sites of deep personal and ancestral significance that Tommy Watson returned to throughout his painting life. For Watson, the titles of his paintings identify locations of personal meaning, places he had visited, places that held him, and Walu sits among them as surely as the soakages, sand hills and sacred grounds that map the land west of Irrunytju. This work is not a landscape in the European sense but a mindscape: an aerial, felt rendering of Walu, built from layered, thickly worked colour. In it the rockhole is not depicted so much as summoned, its place in the wider body of country, its hold on memory, and its standing within the law all gathered into the incandescent reds, golds and pinks that became the artist's signature.