Colours of Utopia

The art of Utopia, 230km northeast of Alice Springs, has been a major force in Australian art since the early 1990s, when women artists of the region began painting on canvas for the first time.

Most well-known is Emily Kame Kngwarreye whose work when she first started painting in the early 1990s attracted a huge response. Now, more than 30 years later, Kngwarreye’s work continues to garner ever growing international attention with her work on the secondary market maintaining the record as the highest of any Australian woman artist.

Significant in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings were her use of colour and bold, free imagery. Her work paved the way for other Aboriginal artists to forge their own individual styles and vibrant coloration.

Notable were Kngwarreye’s painting contemporaries who included Gloria Petyarre, Polly Ngale. Jeannie Mills Pwerle and Barbara Weir. As with Kngwarreye, vibrant colouration and highly individualistic imagery characterised their work.

Ever since, colour and highly individualistic design have been notable features in the work of Utopia’s women artists.

Belinda Golder Kngwarreye, Janet Golder Kngwarreye, Rochelle Bird Mbitjana

Belinda and Janet Golder Kngwarreye are the granddaughters of founding Utopia painters Polly Ngale.

Belinda’s works often feature the bush plum and the bush yam, The women of Utopia conduct ceremonies in tribute to the bush plum and bush yam to ensure their continued growth. Both she and her older sister Janet Golder Kngwarreye create works that represent a number of women’s stories of her Utopia country. Utopia is not one central community, but rather a collection of small homeland settlements established next to underground water bores across a vast area. It is this which has led to artists from different parts of Utopia developing their distinctively different styles. Janet and Belinda each pay tribute to these in their encyclopaedic paintings called My Country or Alhalkere- My Country. Janet’s daughter, Rochelle Bird Mbitjana is now following in her mother’s footsteps.

Esther Haywood Petyarre

The late artist Gloria Petyarre began a stylistic movement that continues until this day. In 1999, Petyarre became amongst the first Aboriginal artists to win a major award at an East Coast public Gallery when she won the Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting at the AGNSW with her multi-panel work, Leaves.

Petyarre’s granddaughter Esther Haywood continues her grandmother’s tradition – handling the skill of painterly movement as dextrously as Petyarre did, and continuing her significant work also as a colourist.

Emily Pwerle, Charmaine Pwerle, Lizzie Moss Pwerle

Emily Pwerle (now aged in her late 90s) is a sister to the late Minnie Pwerle, who became an art star in her 80s from 2006. Emily Pwerle continues to paint women’s stories of ceremony. Charmaine Pwerle – Minnie’s grand-daughter and Barbara Weir’s daughter – inherited her grandmother Minnie’s Awelye (women’s ceremonial stories) and brings her own energy and dynamism to paintings of Awelye. Lizzie Moss Pwerle is a first cousin of Minnie Pwerle and was part of Utopia’s early batik making projects. Her distinctive monochrome paintings depict the lines women paint on their bodies for ceremony.

Jeannie Mills Pwerle, Bernadine Kemarre, Caroline Petrick Ngwarreye, Lizzie Moss Pwerle, Selina Teece Pwerle

Senior artist Jeannie Mills Pwerle has become well known for her lush Yam dreaming paintings in which she loads the same brush with a mix of cleverly combined colours. Younger artists Bernadine Kemarre and Caroline Petrick Kngwarreye continue the tradition of bush medicine and seed dreaming paintings in new and distinctive styles while Selina Teece Pwerle creates luminous landscapes that depict the scale as well as detail of her beautiful lands.