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

Code: PPFAAP1173

Artist: Anna Petyarre

Title: Grandmother'S Country

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 96x116cm

Year: 2009

A whirl of tiny brushmarks radiates from the centre of the canvas, spinning outward in orange, rust, ochre and gold. The dotted strokes gather like grasses bent by wind, or seed heads catching light on open country. Look closer and the surface breaks into thousands of small painted leaves, each one carefully placed, each one carrying its own rhythm.

Anna Petyarre belongs to the celebrated group of women painters from the Utopia region in the Northern Territory. Her work draws on the plants, seeds and body designs of her Country, painted with the fine dotting and layered mark making that has become a hallmark of Utopia painting. Grandmother's Country honours the land her family has walked for generations. It is a portrait of place made through the language of pattern.

The composition pulses. There is no single horizon, no fixed viewpoint. Instead the painter offers an aerial sense of Country, a way of seeing where earth, plant life and season fold into one another. Warm reds dominate, cut by threads of yellow and touches of black and white. The white dotting sits on top like sun striking the tips of grass.

Standing with the work, the eye is drawn again and again to the small still point at the centre. Everything else moves around it. That quiet organising heart is what gives the painting its authority. It reads as a record of memory, of return, of a granddaughter walking the same ground her grandmother knew.