Gloria Petyarre was one of the most important artists to come out of Utopia, the Anmatyerre and Alyawarr homelands about 270km north-east of Alice Springs. She was born there around 1945, spoke Anmatyerre, and her Country is Aknangkere.
She's one of the seven Petyarre sisters, alongside Ada Bird, Jean, Kathleen, Myrtle, Nancy and Violet, in a family that's produced some of the most collected work in Aboriginal art. Gloria started out in the Utopia women's batik group, which began in 1977, and moved to painting on canvas in 1988. Her early work was Awelye: the designs women paint across the top half of their bodies for ceremony.
In 1999 she became the first Aboriginal artist to win the Wynne Prize for landscape at the Art Gallery of NSW, for a green and gold painting titled Leaves. That work, along with the Bush Medicine Leaves paintings behind it, is what she's best known for around the world.
Gloria exhibited widely in Australia and overseas across her career, and her work is held in major public and private collections here and abroad. She passed away in June 2021.
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally. It was purchased directly from Gloria, and a gallery certificate of authenticity is provided with the sale.
Her Dreamings
Bush Medicine Leaves (also called Leaves) — This is the work Gloria is famous for, and the two names are really the same story. The leaves come from the Kurrajong, a native shrub that grows across the Utopia region. The women gather the leaves, boil them and mash them with kangaroo or emu fat to make a paste that keeps for months and is used on cuts, wounds, bites and rashes. The leaves change colour through the year, and Gloria painted them mid-fall, thousands of small strokes drifting across the canvas as if caught in the wind. She started doing it in 1994 at Mosquito Bore, and her sisters, daughters and nieces have carried the style on ever since.
Awelye (women's ceremony and body paint) — The designs women wear across their chest and shoulders for ceremony. This was Gloria's earliest subject, going right back to her batik work. In the paintings the lines swirl and radiate the way the paint sits on the skin, often put on with the fingers, the same way it goes on during ceremony.
Arnkerrthe (Mountain / Thorny Devil Lizard) — A small spiny desert lizard and one of Gloria's most important ancestral stories. Arnkerrthe travelled across her Country creating the sites, songs and stories, and carries a sac of ochre at its neck that the people use for ceremony. Gloria's swirling design for this one, which she called the "swirly ones", stands for the thorny skin on the lizard's back.
Aknangkere — Aknangkere is Gloria's own Country. Late in her career she developed a looser, more contemporary series called Aknangkere Growth, using lines of colour running across the canvas to show the plant life regenerating on her homeland.
Grass Seeds — Native grass seed is a traditional bush food, gathered and ground by the women. It's one of the seed and bush-food stories the Utopia artists carried across from body paint and batik into their paintings; Gloria painted it in works like Sacred Grass, using a strong linear pattern with little dotting.
Pencil Yam — A bush food with an edible root that's dug from the ground. It's one of the bush-food Dreamings shared across the Petyarre family and the wider Utopia group, alongside the grass seed and medicine leaf stories.
