Josepha Petrick Kemarre

Josepha Petrick Kemarre is an Anmatyerre-speaking Indigenous Australian, born around 1945 or 1953 at the Santa Teresa Mission, near Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory. When Josepha Petrick began painting for Mbantua Gallery in central Australia, she indicated that her name was Josepha rather than Josie, and that this was how she henceforth wished to be known; however Mbantua's biography is the only source that has used that version of her name. After marrying Robin Petyarre, brother of artist Gloria Petyarre, Josepha Petrick moved to the region of Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs, which is where she was living when she began painting around 1990. They had seven children, one of whom, Damien Petrick, went on to become an artist like his mother. By 2008, Josie Petrick's husband had died, and Petrick was dividing her time between Alice Springs and Harts Range, to its north-east. == Professional background ==

'' is represented in Josie Petrick's paintings of bush plum dreaming. Contemporary Indigenous art of the western desert began in 1971 when Indigenous men at Papunya created murals and canvases using western art materials, assisted by teacher Geoffrey Bardon. Their work, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly after the introduction of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983. By the 1980s and '90s, such work was being exhibited internationally. The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists' company, were men, and there was resistance among the Pintupi men of central Australia to women also painting. However, many of the women wished to participate, and in the 1990s many of them began to paint. In the western desert communities such as Utopia, Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale. as part of the contemporary Indigenous art movement that had begun at Papunya in the 1970s. By 1998 her work was being collected by both private and public institutions, such as Charles Sturt University, Petrick's paintings have been included at exhibitions in several private galleries in Melbourne and Hong Kong, as well as at the Australian embassy in Washington in 2001. An image based on a triptych by Petrick, Bush Berries, appears on the cover of a book on the visual perception of motion, Motion Vision. Central Australian artists frequently paint particular "dreamings", or stories, for which they have responsibility or rights. These stories are used to pass "important knowledge, cultural values and belief systems" from generation to generation. Paintings by Petrick portray two different groups of dreamings, rendered in two distinct styles. These paintings are undertaken with red, blue and orange dots that represent the fruit at different stages in its development. Art consultant Adrian Newstead has ranked her as amongst the country's top 200 Indigenous artists, noting that she has become "known for innovative works that create a sense of visual harmony through fine variegated fields of immaculately applied dotting". ==Notes==