For several years my work has drawn inspiration from the Australian landscape-not the landscape of pristine wilderness but that which reflects the imposition of mankind-the cutting, scoring, altering and ordering-responses both incongruous and sympathetic to the natural formations of millennia.
    This should not be seen as any judgmental stance. It is simply the inspiration for so many sculptural possibilities in clay-the contrasts, harmonies, textures and visual dynamics that arise from those opposing forces on he environment-nature and human.
    It is some ways a metaphor for "the struggle of opposites".
    Another avenue of expression, which developed over a decade ago, was the incorporation of materials, other than ceramics, in wall panels and sculptural forms.
     While there is an obvious visual segregation from the purely ceramic work there lies a commonality in the inspiration and concepts, albeit, on a more personal level in the wall pieces.
     Dr. David McNeill, of the Australian National University, in a foreword to a 1992 catalogue of an exhibition in which the mixed media wall works appeared, said in part:
     "Watt is in charge of the Ceramic Department at the School of Art, Australian National University in Canberra but he also lives on a farming property on the south coast [of New South Wales]. As any farmer knows grazing properties are redolent with their own eroding histories. Old farming structures, rusted implements, decomposing posts and railings all bear mute witness to previous attempts to negotiate a life on the land. Such detritus remains as a momento mori. If sympathetically handled and scrutinized it can conjure a past, evoking the dignity of labour or remind us of our apparent need to continually overlay and remake our environment."
     Watt discovered many such traces of earlier occupation while cleaning up his farm and he chose not to destroy them. They turn up in the imposing new wall reliefs that he exhibits here for the first time. In these pieces he uses modern art's ubiquitous grid format as a metaphor for the process of partitioning the landscape. The support for this work is constructed from old worn fencing timber which is overlaid with more precise and pristine metal and ceramic secretions. Thus the discarded material of settlement is reinstated; it is allowed a kind of "second life" in the context of an art gallery. It is appropriate that Watt produces such art as a response to working in Canberra since this city, more than any other in the country, is characterized by the almost manic effacement of any suggestion of historical change save that which is institutionally sanctified. The kinds of histories to Which Watt's wall piece allude may be anonymous and humble but they should be no less interesting to us for that.
     Contemporary artists will often choose to start their work from scratch, creating meaning from materials that are, as it were, content neutral, In such cases it is the configuration of substance and this alone that carries the burden of  symbolic signification. However this is not the only way of proceeding and the option to work material in such a manner that the associations which is already "contains" survive into the finished artwork is always available. In fact many assemblage artists do work this way.