Summary

About the Artwork

Anaty (pronounced 'ung-kiy-yah) - commonly known as a Desert Yam, Bush Potato or rock morning glory - is a native plant (Ipomoea costata) that grows on sandy or rocky soils and on spinifex sand plains in Northern Australia. It produces edible tubers which are a staple food for the people of the Country where it occurs and can be eaten raw or cooked. Anaty carries a Dreaming Story which artists continue to be taught as they get older. Dreaming subjects and stories are usually about things that affect society. By depicting Anaty in their paintings, the artist is paying pay homage to this significant plant and its related ceremony, to communicate their related cultural and nutritional value, to keep the cultural knowledge alive and promote continual rejuvenation.

Artist Biography

Jeannie Mills Pwerle is a highly respected artist from the Utopia region of the Northern Territory. She has close family connections to some of Australia's top names in art. Her mother is well known Utopian artist Dolly Mills Petyarre and her uncle, the late Greeny Purvis Petyarre. Her great aunt is the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, dubbed by art experts as one of the world's best modern and abstract artists.

Jeannie has become renowned for her paintings of Anaty Dreaming, which she inherited from her mother. She depicts this story in a unique style that is all her own, using a variety of colours in each brush stroke, she builds up a pattern of harmonious (and occasionally contrasting) colours. Her artworks include forms and a colour palette that predominantly represent the flowers and the seeds of the plant. They also evoke the plant's impressive root system (the edible yams) and the colours of the foliage.

Jeannie lives and paints in Ahalpere Country in the Utopia Region where she also practices as a ngangker (traditional healer or doctor) providing advice, bush medicines and applications to people of her community. Her work has been exhibited in Australia since 1998, and internationally since 2002.