Sonia Daniels Nakamarra / Bush Medicine Leaves (SND02)

Born in 1972, Sonia Daniels Nakamarra is a Warlpiri woman from Nyirripi, a remote Ingenious community located approximately 500km west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. As with the nearby Central Desert communities of Yuendumu and Utopia, Indigenous art from Nyirripi is celebrated as some of the most stylistically diverse, colourful and exciting Aboriginal art in Australia. Through their bold experimentation with new techniques, these artist communities are exploring their ‘Jukurrpa’ or dreaming stories anew, as well as reinvigorating depictions of country with vision and vibrant intensity. Jukurrpa stories have complex cultural meanings and are an important source of inspiration, knowledge and unchallengeable sacred authority in Aboriginal Australia, while also seamlessly connecting past and present.

Sonia predominantly paints ‘Bush Medicine Leaves’. Creating incredibly detailed and mesmeric compositions, Sonia’s tapered brushwork draws on the representational style and techniques initially developed by acclaimed Utopian artist, Gloria Petyarre, in the late 1990s. Today, leaf-work has become an important and popular style within Aboriginal art.

Sonia paints ‘Bush Medicine Leaves’. A native species of acacia, bush medicine leaves are used extensively in traditional Indigenous healing. The leaves are prepared in two ways: either boiled to create a tea that helps alleviate stomach upsets, or ground with kangaroo fat to extract the leaves’ resin and create a paste. This paste is then applied as a salve to bites, burns and abrasions, as well as also being used as an insect repellent. During the life cycle of the plant, the bush medicine leaves change colour and eventually float to the ground, inspiring the movement and vivid spectrum of colour characteristic of Indigenous leaf-work designs.