Bessie Purvis Petyarre / Bush Plum (Anwekety) Dreaming (20020)

Bessie Purvis Petyarre was born in 1971 in the Utopia region of Central Australia. An Anmatyerre artist from Alhalkere Country, she was born into one of Utopia’s most significant artistic families and grew up surrounded by the cultural knowledge, ceremony and painting traditions for which the region has become internationally renowned.

Bessie’s mother was the highly regarded artist Polly Ngale (c.1936–2022), one of the senior women of Ahalpere Country and one of Utopia’s most accomplished painters. Polly was among the generation of women central to the development of the Utopia art movement, initially working in batik before becoming celebrated for her extraordinary paintings of Anwekety, the Bush Plum or Conkerberry Dreaming. Her richly layered fields of colour became instantly recognisable and her work was exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Bessie’s aunties Kathleen and Angelina Ngale were also prominent Utopia artists, creating an extraordinary family lineage of women painters.

Bessie’s mother was from Ahalpere Country, while her father was from neighbouring Alhalkere Country. Through these family connections Bessie holds knowledge and permission to paint Dreamings belonging to both places. From her mother’s side she paints Anwekety, continuing the Bush Plum story closely associated with Polly and the women of Ahalpere. From her father’s Alhalkere Country she also paints stories associated with Atnwelarre, the Pencil Yam, and Kame, its seed.

Bessie grew up learning from the senior women and artists around her, particularly her mother, and her paintings reflect this deep family and cultural inheritance. Her Bush Plum works continue the Anwekety tradition through dense, layered applications of colour. Rather than depicting individual plants literally, she builds expansive fields of marks that evoke the abundance and movement of the plant across Country. Layers of dots overlap and merge, creating depth, rhythm and an almost shimmering surface.

Bessie works in an exceptionally broad palette, from earthy reds and oranges to pinks, greens, blues, purples and soft pastels, with each painting developing its own distinctive character. While her work carries the unmistakable influence of the Utopia painting tradition and the artistic legacy of her mother, she has developed a vibrant and highly individual approach of her own.

In 2024 Bessie presented her first solo exhibition, Alhalkere, at Utopia Lane Gallery. These works placed greater emphasis on her father’s Country and marked a further development in her painting practice, combining layered fields of colour, linear forms and dot work to encompass the landscape and underground systems of Alhalkere. For Bessie, these works express identity and connection to Country while carrying forward the artistic legacy of the remarkable Utopia painters who came before her.

Bessie continues to live and paint in the Utopia region, maintaining the stories inherited through her family while developing her own distinctive contemporary painting practice.

This painting depicts Anwekety, the Conkerberry, commonly referred to as the Bush Plum. The story was passed to Bessie through her mother, the renowned Utopia artist Polly Ngale, who was a senior custodian of the Anwekety Dreaming associated with Ahalpere Country.

Anwekety is a small desert fruit traditionally gathered as an important bush food. Within the Dreaming associated with Ahalpere, ancestral winds travelled across Country carrying the seeds of the Anwekety plant. The first plants grew and bore fruit, dropping their seeds before the winds carried them onwards, spreading Anwekety throughout the Dreaming lands.

Bessie's painting evokes this profusion of growth across Country through layer upon layer of expressive dotting. Colours emerge, overlap and disappear beneath subsequent marks, creating a richly textured surface filled with movement. The dense accumulation of paint suggests the continual regeneration of the Anwekety as it flowers, fruits and spreads across the land.

Bessie paints the story in an extraordinary variety of palettes, from brilliant blues, greens, reds and oranges to pinks, yellows and softer mixed tones. Rather than relying upon a fixed colour scheme, it is the repeated layering and rhythm of her marks that binds the paintings together. This distinctive approach continues the celebrated Anwekety painting tradition of her mother, Polly Ngale, while allowing Bessie to develop a vibrant visual language of her own.

The Anwekety Dreaming is more than a story of bush food. It expresses the continuing relationship between people, plants, ancestors and Country, and the cultural knowledge that is passed from one generation to the next through family, ceremony and painting.