Freda Price, Aboriginal Artist

Freda Price Pulla is an Anmatyerre artist from the expansive Indigenous homelands region of Utopia, in the remote Northern Territory some 240km north-east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). She is the daughter of acclaimed artist Anna Pitjara, her aunt is artist Delvine Pitjara, and she is granddaughter to the late, great artist Glory Ngarla (dec.). Utopia is a region of great artistic and cultural legacy, from where many well-known artists have emerged, including Gloria Petyarre, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Polly Ngale.

Freda was born in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) around 1984 and raised at Atneltyeye, the Boundary Bore outstation at the heart of her family's Country. Her father was Colin Price Kemarre, who passed away in 2004, and she began painting professionally in 2006 — the third consecutive generation of painting women in her line, after her grandmother Glory Ngarla of the Utopia batik era and her mother Anna. Her sister Naomi also paints, extending the family practice sideways as well as down the generations.

Freda depicts her grandmother's country, surrounding Atneltyey (Boundary Bore) and the winding dry creekbeds and soakage sites that define the Utopia homelands. Though rugged and dry for much of the year, heavy rains transform the landscape, becoming dense with native spinifex grasses, mulga trees and blooming wildflowers. Like her mother, Freda prefers to paint in monochromatic or reduced colour palettes.

Primarily working in black and white, or a reduced colour palette, Freda takes after her mother's style and delicately paints her country from an aerial point of view. Freda creates undulations with small white dots and fine needlework designs to map the sandhills, salt lakes and waterholes of her country, showcasing the various textures of the landscape.

Alongside these aerial My Country works, Freda paints Atnwelarre (Pencil Yam) and Kame (Pencil Yam Seed), the principal stories of her mother's Country, Alhalkere — the same yam Dreaming that anchors Anna's practice, and the very Kame from which Emily Kame Kngwarreye took her name. The pencil yam threads its roots beneath the sandhill country Freda maps from above, so that her two bodies of work are really one subject seen at different depths: the surface of the Country in her topographic paintings, and the life beneath it in her yam works. Her paintings now circulate well beyond Utopia, with works appearing at auction in Australia and, in recent years, in Paris.