KATIE RUMBLE PITJARA (PETYARRE)

TITLE: BUSH PLUM

Katie is connected through her Pitjara/Petyarre skin name to one of Utopia's most celebrated painting families, including cousins Gloria and Kathleen Petyarre. In Central Desert kinship, sharing a skin name carries deep cultural weight defining family ties, ceremonial rights and Dreaming ownership, even outside direct bloodlines. Katie's sister Mary Rumble Petyarre also paints.

Katie's Bush Medicine and Bush Plum works draw on knowledge held by Anmatyerre women for thousands of years the gathering and use of native leaves, seeds and berries for their restorative properties, long before Western medicine reached Central Australia. Her paintings carry this knowledge forward on canvas and linen, in patterns that work on several levels at once: the fruit, leaves and flowers of the plant itself, and the body-paint designs worn during Awelye, women's ceremony, one of the world's oldest continuous art forms, used to heal, to connect to country, and to pass tradition on to the next generation.

Like much of Utopia's painting tradition, this lineage traces back to the community's Batik Project of the late 1970s, when local women began translating body-paint designs onto fabric, before the shift to acrylic on canvas and linen in the late 1980s.

Across her work, Katie moves fluidly between colour and technique, rarely settling into one fixed approach.

This painting was purchased directly from Katie and comes with a Gallery certificate of authenticity.