Judy Watson has visited Kluge-Ruhe three times, first in 2009 as part of Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial, when she saw Thomas Jefferson’s architectural drawings in the exhibition Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece. She returned to Kluge-Ruhe in 2011 for an artist residency sponsored by UVA Arts Council. At this time, Watson toured Monticello with historian Leni Sorenson, who pointed out Jefferson’s “experimental beds”—gardens where he experimented with seeds and plants from around the world to assess their adaptability to Virginia’s climate—which gave her the title of her work. But the title also alludes to Jefferson’s long-term relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings. The union between a white man and a black woman was one of many parallels that Watson identified between her own Aboriginal family and the enslaved people in Jefferson’s household. Watson incorporated Jefferson’s architectural drawings of the Academical Village and her own sketches of artifacts unearthed at Monticello’s Mulberry Row and vegetables grown in Jefferson’s “experimental beds” in a suite of six etchings. After returning to Australia, she worked with printer Basil Hall to edition experimental beds, which was co-published by Kluge-Ruhe, the artist and grahame galleries + editions in Brisbane. Watson returned to Charlottesville in 2013 to present a Ted talk on experimental beds at TedX Charlottesville.

The success of experimental beds inspired Judy Watson to a related project with objects at the British Museum in 2015, which resulted in a suite of etchings titled holes in the land which were included in her exhibition in 2024 at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.