Belinda Golder Kngwarreye, Aboriginal Artist

Belinda Golder Kngwarreye is an Alyawarre artist from Utopia, an Indigenous homelands region some 240km north-east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Belinda is the sister of noted Utopian artist, Janet Golder Kngwarreye. Belinda is following in the footsteps of other well-known artists from the talented Kngwarreye family, most notably Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kudditji Kngwarreye and her grandmother, Polly Ngale. Belinda paints Bush Medicine and My Country designs, but she is best known for painting the story handed to her by Polly Ngale - the Bush Plum Dreaming.

Belinda was born in Alice Springs in 1988 and grew up at Boundary Bore, one of the sixteen homelands scattered across the Utopia community, attending school there before making the move to Alice Springs as a young teenager. She began painting in her twenties under the direct guidance of Polly Ngale, and also learned technique from her sister Janet. The artistic web around her extends further still: senior Utopia artists Kathleen Ngale and Angelina Ngale are her great aunts. Belinda remembers watching Emily Kame Kngwarreye paint when she was a young girl, and one of her cherished approaches adopts the "dump dot" method Emily made famous — dots applied generously with the brush so that wet colours mix and merge on the canvas, building the shimmering depth her Bush Plum works are known for.

Anwekety, the bush plum, is a nutritious food source, high in vitamin C, and is a highly sought-after bush tucker. Women know where the bush plum grows, and they make journeys to go and collect them. There is also spiritual significance to the bush plum, and songs and ceremony are performed in the hope that the plants will regenerate and continue to provide for them.

Sometimes called conkerberry, anwekety is the fruit of Carissa lanceolata, a tangled, spiny shrub that flowers fragrantly after rain and bears fruit for only a few weeks of the year — so the women collect them in quantity and dry them for storage, soaking them in water again before they are eaten. The plant is also a bush medicine: the orange inner bark of its roots can be soaked to make a wash used for skin and eye conditions. In the Dreaming story Belinda inherits through Polly Ngale, winds blew from every direction carrying the anwekety seed across the ancestral lands, where the first bush plums of the Dreaming grew, fruited and dropped their seeds to be carried on again. Alongside her Bush Plum works, Belinda has broadened her repertoire to include Atnwelarre (Pencil Yam), Kame (Pencil Yam Seed) and Awelye designs, and her My Country series depicts her ancestral Country of Alhalkere — the same celebrated Country immortalised by Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Belinda uses heavily layered paint to depict the bush plum in various stages of ripening. Just like the artists from which Belinda learnt, Belinda possesses an innate sense of colour. This dreamy and meditative style of painting has often been compared to that of the 19th century Impressionist painters.