Abie Loy Kemarre Bush Medicine Leaf Dreaming

Abie Loy Kemarre Bush Medicine Leaf Dreaming

Biography:

Abie Loy Kemarre is the granddaughter of the Kathleen Petyarre, is also related to widely regarded painters Gloria Petyarre, Ada Bird Petyarre and the late Emily Kngwarreye.

As a young child in the late 1970s and early 1980s at remote Utopia, almost three hundred kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Abie closely observed her older women relatives working with batik.

Under the guidance of her grandmother, Abie Loy’s talent blossomed.  A highly disciplined artist who possess a strong technical command of all aspects of painting, including line, intrinsic form and surface quality, use of colour, and overall balance of composition, she is also willing to experiment with all of these elements, to the extent permitted by Eastern Anmatyerr law, of which she is deeply observant.

Under Eastern Anmatyerr Law, Abie Loy Kemarre has the right to portray several Dreamings. These include the Bush Hen (Turkey) Dreaming and Bush Leaf Dreaming.

Abie Loy Kemarre’s works are held in numerous collections including Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan, Festival of Arts Foundation Collection, Adelaide, Australia, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, Australia, Musee des Confluences, Lyon, France, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, U.S.A., The Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commission Collection, Canberra, Australia, The Adelaide University Art Collection, Adelaide, Australia, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, The Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles, USA., The Levi-Kaplan Collection, Seattle, USA., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, and The National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia

Artwork:

The Bush Leaf Dreaming is an inheritance from Abie’s father’s side. The bush leaf grows in a swamp near some sandhills close to the Utopia region in Abie’s grandfather’s country and it is known for its wonderful curative properties; these bush leaves cure a range of illnesses including colds, headaches, and sores.

The Bush Leaf, as a Dreaming, is closely associated with women, and is a shapeshifter, a state-changer, possessing the ability to transform herself from her bush leaf-form into a woman and back into a leaf again. The aspect of the Bush Leaf Dreaming that Abie paints belongs to women only.

The accompanying Dreaming narrative contains a good deal of information about the precise locations of this leaf, in arid parts of the country.[1]

^{[1] Nicholls, Christine, Art, History, Place, Working Title Press, 2007}