When Josepha Petrick began painting for Mbantua Gallery in central Australia, she indicated that her name was Josepha rather than Josie, and that this was how she henceforth wished to be known;\u00a0however Mbantua’s biography is the only source that has used that version of her name.<\/p>\n
After marrying Robin Petyarre, brother of artist\u00a0Gloria Petyarre, Josepha Petrick moved to the region of\u00a0Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs,\u00a0which is where she was living when she began painting around 1990.\u00a0They had seven children, one of whom, Damien Petrick, went on to become an artist like his mother. By 2008, Josie Petrick’s husband had died, and Petrick was dividing her time between Alice Springs and\u00a0Harts Range, to its north-east.<\/p>\n
Josepha Petrick began painting about 1990\u00a0or 1992\u00a0as part of the contemporary Indigenous art movement that had begun at Papunya in the 1970s.\u00a0By 1998 her work was being collected by both private and public institutions, such as\u00a0Charles Sturt University,\u00a0and in 2005 a work was purchased by the\u00a0National Gallery of Victoria.\u00a0Her career received a significant boost when her work was included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2006\u00a0Landmarks<\/em>\u00a0exhibition and its catalogue; her painting was printed opposite that of\u00a0Yannima Tommy Watson, who was by this time famous, particularly for his contribution to the design of a new building for the\u00a0Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly.\u00a0Petrick’s paintings have been included at exhibitions in several private galleries in Melbourne and Hong Kong, as well as at the Australian embassy in Washington in 2001.<\/p>\n In 2006 a commissioned work by Petrick was exhibited at Shalom College at the\u00a0University of New South Wales\u00a0as part of a charity fundraising exhibition. It sold for\u00a0A$22,000. As of the end of 2008, the highest recorded auction price for an item of Petrick’s work was $22,800, set in May 2007.\u00a0An image based on a\u00a0triptych\u00a0by Petrick,\u00a0Bush Berries<\/em>, appears on the cover of a book on the visual perception of motion,\u00a0Motion Vision<\/em>.<\/p>\n Central Australian artists frequently paint particular “dreamings”, or stories, for which they have responsibility or rights.\u00a0These stories are used to pass “important knowledge, cultural values and belief systems” from generation to generation.\u00a0Paintings by Petrick portray two different groups of dreamings, rendered in two distinct styles.\u00a0Bush plum\u00a0dreaming represents a plant of the central Australian desert which is “a source of physical and spiritual sustenance, reminding [the local Indigenous people] of the sacredness of [their] country”.\u00a0These paintings are undertaken with red, blue and orange dots that represent the fruit at different stages in its development.\u00a0She also paints women\u2019s ceremonies (Awelye<\/em>) and dreamings, and these are created using rows of coloured dots and include representations of women’s ceremonial\u00a0iconography.<\/p>\n Journalist Zelda Cawthorne described Petrick as one of the “finest contemporary Aboriginal artists”.\u00a0Art consultant\u00a0Adrian Newstead\u00a0has ranked her as amongst the country’s top 200 Indigenous artists, noting that she has become “known for innovative works that create a sense of visual harmony through fine variegated fields of immaculately applied dotting”.\u00a0Her style is described by Indigenous art writers Birnberg and Kreczmanski as an “interesting, modern interpretation of landscape”.<\/p>\n Petrick’s work is held in a variety of public and private collections, including\u00a0Artbank,\u00a0the\u00a0Charles Sturt University\u00a0Collection,\u00a0the\u00a0Holmes a Court\u00a0Collection,\u00a0and the\u00a0National Gallery of Victoria.<\/p>\n
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