Gladys Daniels b. 1968

Gladys Daniels grew up around the renowned painting community of Warumpi (Papunya) in the Northern Territory, some 340km west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Gladys is the daughter of celebrated artist, Barney Daniels Tjungarrayi (1950-1998), who taught her to paint when she was a young girl growing up at 5 Mile Outstation. Gladys's sister, Cecily Daniels, is also a talented artist.

The father who taught Gladys to paint was a significant figure in his own right. Barney Daniels Tjungurrayi was born at Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) to an Anmatyerre mother from Napperby and a Warlpiri father, and lived the classic stockman's life of his generation — five years mustering brumbies at Halls Creek in Western Australia before returning to drove cattle on his own Country. Entirely self-taught, he began painting in the mid-1980s on small boards sold in Alice Springs, and developed into one of the recognised innovators of Western Desert painting: he was among the first artists to build his compositions over stippled brushwork backgrounds, a technique that became his trademark. His standing is a matter of record — he appears in Vivien Johnson's Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert: A Biographical Dictionary and in landmark survey publications including Dot and Circle (1986).

Gladys paints the tali (sandhills) that define the topography of her desert country. Her style of painting is characteristic of Western Desert artists, using dot and line work to represent ancient, sacred Dreaming stories. Using this seemingly simple mark-making technique, Gladys creates incredible optical-style art with rhythm, movement and depth.

The inheritance Gladys received from her father was twofold. There were the Dreamings themselves — Barney's totems, passed down from his Tjapaltjarri fathers over generations, included the Snake, Blue-Tongued Lizard, Bush Fire and Witchetty Grub stories, a direct line of transmission to the ancestors of his Country. And there was a way of working: a belief that the ground of a painting, built up mark by patient mark, does as much storytelling as the iconography laid over it. Gladys's meticulous fields of dot and line — surfaces that shimmer and shift as the eye moves across them — carry that family conviction into a new generation.

The sandhills that span her country, along with all the topographic features of the land, are believed to have been formed by the travels of ancestral beings during the ancient Creation era. The ancient Tingari Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) songlines trace the movements of the Tingari ancestors, and form the basis of traditional law, social structure, and ceremonial life for people of the Pintupi and Luritja language groups of the Western desert regions. Gladys has a meticulous technique that lends her canvases a mesmerising effect, and her colour palettes capture the essence of the undulating desert landscape.