About Kathleen Petyarre
Kathleen was born at the important water soak called Atnangkere 240km NE of Alice springs. She is from the Alawarre/Eastern Anmatyeere clan. She is one of seven sisters including, Ada Bird Petyarre, Violet Petyarre, Myrtle Petyarre, and Gloria Petyarre- who are all renowned artists. She lives part-time in Adelaide and Mosquito Bore at Utopia.
Her Dreamings are Mountain Devil / Thorny Devil Lizard, Dingo, and Women Hunting Emu. Petyarre was introduced to the batik medium at a hippy commune on a visit to Wollongong, New South Wales, and began making her own batik in 1977 with the support and encouragement of the linguist and adult education instructor Jenny Green. Petyarre continued to produce batiks with other women at Utopia until the late 1980s, when, prompted by allergies to the chemicals they were using, she began developing her signature style painting with acrylic on canvas.
Petyarre’s technique consisted of layering very fine dots of thin acrylic paint onto the canvas, evoking the Aboriginal custom of ceremonial body painting, to carefully construct abstract landscapes that reveal a remarkable depth when viewed up close. The dots are used to represent, among other things, flowers and spinifex, or animated clouds of sand, hail, or even bush seeds. Meanwhile, various shapes and colours are used to depict geographical features such as sand-hills, watercourses, and rock holes. Her imagery has been described as “simultaneously macro- and microcosmic”
Petyarre’s rise to international recognition began at the Aboriginal Art from Utopia exhibition at the Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne on 31 October 1989. Despite remaining a relative unknown for the years to follow, she surprised the art world in 1996 by selling out her first solo exhibition, Kathleen Petyarre: Storm in Atnangkere Country, at Melbourne’s Alcaston House Gallery.
She won the Telstra art prize in Darwin in 1996. Kathleen passed away in November 2018.