Anna Petyarre | 'Grandmother's Country, 2009' | 96x116cm

Code: PPFAAP1173

Artist: Anna Petyarre

Title: Grandmother's Country

Area: Utopia, NT

Community: Anmatyerre

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 96x116cm

Year: 2009

In Grandmother's Country, Anna Petyarre paints the ancestral country handed down through the women of her family in the Utopia region. From a bright centre, hundreds of small seed-shaped forms spiral out across the canvas, each outlined in fine black and white dots, so the whole surface seems to turn and shimmer. The forms recall the yam seeds at the heart of her Dreaming, scattered across the ground after rain and carrying the next season's growth. Deep reds, oranges and yellows give the colours of the desert earth and its heat, lifted by touches of soft pink. The painting honours what the women of her family know: where food grows, when to gather it, and how ceremony keeps the land productive. Here, country is alive and constantly renewing, passed from grandmother to granddaughter.

Anna Petyarre is an Anmatyerre artist from the Utopia homelands, about 230 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. She was born there around 1960 and lives at Atneltyeye (Boundary Bore). She comes from one of Utopia's leading artistic families. Her mother, the batik artist Glory Ngarla, was her first teacher, and she is a niece of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Like many Utopia women, Anna first worked in batik. She moved to canvas and acrylic when they reached the community in the early 1980s, and has since become one of the leading painters of Utopia's second generation. Her central subjects are the Bush Yam and Yam Seed Dreamings, which belong to her grandfather's and father's country at Atneltyeye. She also paints awelye, the body designs painted for women's ceremony. Her early works used the region's traditional symbols and bold colour. Over time she developed the fine, layered dot work and interwoven forms she is now known for. These describe sandhills, flood plains, waterholes and the growth of country after rain.

Her work is held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Powerhouse Museum, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Artbank, the Kerry Stokes Collection and the Holmes à Court Collection. In 1998 she was a finalist in the 15th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award.