Anthea Riley, Aboriginal Artist

Anthea Riley is an emerging artist from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankuntjatjara (APY) Lands of Central Australia. Anthea was born in Adelaide and went to school between Pukatja (Ernabella) and Amata. Anthea's mother is the highly regarded artist, Alison Munti Riley, who taught Anthea and her sister Amelia the stories of their Country.

Anthea belongs to the third generation of a notable APY Lands artistic family. Her grandmother, Betty Munti, was a founding member of Tjala Arts — the art centre established by the women of Amata in 1997 as Minymaku Arts — and it was Betty who first taught Alison to paint, along with batik and fabric screen printing, at Ernabella Arts. Established in 1948, Ernabella Arts is Australia's oldest continuously running Indigenous art centre, and after a group of its artists travelled to Indonesia in the early 1970s to learn batik, the community became renowned for its intricate batik silks. The creative knowledge passed from Betty to Alison — who went on to win the People's Choice award at the 2011 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards — is now being handed on again, to Anthea and Amelia.

That teaching is deliberate. Alison has led collaborative painting projects in her community aimed at bringing younger artists into the art world, and has said of her own practice: "I do painting to make me happy and to show my kids my grandfather's and my grandmother's country. I show them our stories so they can learn them." Anthea's paintings are the visible result of that transmission — a young Pitjantjatjara artist working through the stories of her Country with the guidance of a mother, and the legacy of a grandmother, who each shaped the art of the APY Lands in their own generation.

Anthea often depicts a favourite bush tucker of kampurarrpa - bush tomatoes. Kampurarrpa are the fruit of Solanum centrale, a hardy and fast-growing shrub that is native to more arid regions of Australia. These plants have provided staple foods to Indigenous people of the desert for many thousands of years. From vibrant purple flowers, the fruit first emerges as green, begins to ripen to a yellow colour, and eventually darkens and turns brown, drying and shrivelling to a "raisin" which can also be eaten. The bush tomatoes are also connected to the significant Kungkarangkalpa Tjukurrpa, Seven Sisters Dreaming, as this songline passes through Anthea's ancestral country in the APY Lands. There is a significant rock painting site associated with this Dreaming, Walinynga, also known as Cave Hill. At this place, the Seven Sisters shape-shifted into bush tomatoes in order to hide from the "bad man" who was pursuing them, Wati Nyiru.

Anthea also paints puntaru; the Pitjantjatjara name for the brown quail, a small bird native to Australia and Papua New Guinea. They usually rely on shrubs and tall grasses for protection, and can be quite shy and skittish. They feed on grasses, seeds, shoots and small invertebrates. They are mostly ground-dwelling birds with short legs.

Anthea prefers to paint with bold brush strokes and colourful, patterned dotting, and is developing her own youthful, individual style while learning culture from the older generation.