Born: Around 1945. Utopia Region, Northern Territory
Language: Anmatyerre
Dreamings: Awelye (Women's Ceremony / Body Paint Designs), Arnkerrthe (Mountain Devil Lizard), Bush Tucker including Bush Seeds
Violet Petyarre is one of the seven Petyarre sisters of Utopia, alongside Ada Bird, Gloria, Jean, Kathleen, Myrtle and Nancy. Between them the sisters carry one of the most recognised names in Aboriginal art, and Violet has been part of that story from the very beginning.
Her working life as an artist began in the late 1970s with batik, when a group of Anmatyerre and Alyawarr women at Utopia were shown the technique and went on to form the Utopia Women's Batik Group. Violet was among them. Wax, dye and silk were the first materials she used to set down her Dreamings. Canvas came later, through the summer project of 1988 and 1989 that saw the Utopia women put their designs onto canvas for the first time, and she has worked in acrylic on canvas and linen ever since.
Violet paints the stories handed down to her by her ancestors. She works in strong line and considered colour, building her surfaces from fine dotting and repeated linear patterning until the whole field seems to move.
DREAMINGS
Arnkerrthe (Mountain Devil Lizard) - The Arnkerrthe is the Dreaming Violet is best known for and the one she holds custodianship of. Also called the Thorny Devil, the little lizard grows to around twenty centimetres and is armoured head to tail in protective spines. It shifts colour to match the ground it moves across, so that it all but disappears into the red sand and spinifex. The markings Violet lays down across the linen are the markings carried on the lizard's own back, and the way she repeats and layers them echoes the way the creature moves over Country and vanishes into it.
Awelye (Women's Ceremony / Body Paint Designs) - Awelye is women's business. Before ceremony the women paint designs across the upper body, working ochres on with fingers and a flat padded stick, singing as they go. The designs belong to particular women, particular Country and particular stories, and painting them is an act of caring for that Country and for each other. What Violet puts on the linen are those same designs, curved bands and fine parallel lines flowing across the surface the way they flow across skin.
Bush Tucker including Bush Seeds -The women of Utopia have always read their Country closely, knowing where the food is, when it comes and how it is gathered and prepared. Violet's bush tucker and bush seed works record that knowledge. The dots and clustered forms are the seeds, fruits and flowering plants themselves, and the pattern of the painting carries the abundance of a season and the country that produced it. Many Utopia artists look at their Country from above when they paint, and these works read that way, as though you are looking down onto the ground where the food grows.
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Violet was a foundation member of the Utopia Women's Batik Group, formed in 1978 after workshops held at Utopia the previous year.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Utopia Women's Paintings, The First Works on Canvas, A Summer Project 1988 to 1989, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney
Utopia, A Picture Story, 88 silk batiks from the Robert Holmes à Court Collection, toured Ireland and Scotland
The Fifth National Aboriginal Art Award Exhibition, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
Hot Wax, national touring exhibition, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 1995
COLLECTIONS
The Holmes à Court Collection, Perth
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Artbank, Sydney
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.
This painting was purchased directly from Violet and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
