Bernadine Johnson Kemarre / Bush Medicine Leaves (BJ345)

Bernadine Johnson Kemarre is an Arrernte artist born in 1974 at Ltyentye Apurte, also known as Santa Teresa, approximately 80 kilometres south-east of Alice Springs in Central Australia. She spent her early years growing up in community, learning about Country, ceremony, bush foods and traditional plant knowledge before later attending school in Alice Springs.

Bernadine comes from a strong artistic family with connections to the Utopia region. Her extended family includes well-known artists Abie Loy Kemarre and Josie Petrick Kemarre, while artist Anna Price Petyarre is her sister-in-law. Bernadine married artist Stephen Pitjara Martin, Anna’s brother, and spent time living at Utopia, further strengthening her connection with the important artistic traditions of the region.

Bernadine began painting in the late 1990s, drawing upon the cultural knowledge she had learned from an early age. Her works explore important women’s stories, native plants, bush foods and traditional bush medicine. She is particularly known for her Bush Medicine Leaves paintings, although her broader body of work has also included bush flowers, yams and other stories associated with Country and family.

Her paintings are characterised by finely controlled brushwork, intricate dotting and a strong understanding of colour. Repeated leaf forms often radiate and flow across the canvas, creating a sense of movement and growth, while subtle shifts between complementary and closely related colours give her larger works remarkable depth. In many of her Bush Medicine paintings, delicate dots surrounding the leaves represent seeds and the continuing regeneration of the plants.

Bernadine’s work has been included in exhibitions around Australia, including the 2019 Tarnanthi exhibition Karra wadlu yaitya purruna: Bush shrubs make you healthy in Adelaide and the 2024 NAIDOC exhibition Keep the Fire Burning! Blak, Loud and Proud at Adelaide Airport. Her work is also represented in the collection of the Museum of International Folk Art in New Mexico, which holds her 2019 painting Circle of Life Dreaming.

This painting depicts Bush Medicine Leaves, an important subject in Bernadine Johnson Kemarre’s work and one closely connected with the traditional knowledge of Aboriginal women in Central Australia.

For generations, women have gathered native plants for food, medicine and ceremony, passing their knowledge of where particular plants grow, when they should be collected and how they can be prepared from one generation to the next.

Bernadine represents the leaves through repeated elongated forms that radiate and flow across the canvas. Their movement creates the impression of plants spreading across Country after seasonal rain, when new growth emerges and the desert landscape begins to regenerate.

The fine dots surrounding the leaves represent seeds, reinforcing ideas of renewal, growth and the continuing cycle of the plants.

Bush medicine has long played an important role in traditional healing practices. Different leaves and plants may be crushed, boiled or prepared in other ways to create remedies used for a range of ailments.

Through this work, Bernadine celebrates the knowledge held by Aboriginal women and the continuing relationship between people, plants and Country.