Glorine Nungurrayi Martin b. 1965

Glorine Nungurrayi Martin was born in 1965 and grew up primarily at Wakurlpa outstation, situated 20km north-west of the remote community of Yuendumu. Some 300km north-west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Yuendumu is renowned for its vibrant art scene. Glorine is the daughter of Samson Japaljarri Martin, who was one of the founding members of Warlukurlangu Artists, the Aboriginal-owned arts centre in Yuendumu. Her mother, Uni Nampijinpa Martin, and younger sister, Andrea Nungurrayi Martin, were both renowned artists.

Wakurlpa is more than a childhood home — it is the place of the Eagle Dreaming, and the Eagle is among the stories Glorine paints, alongside Goanna and scenes of women with their coolamons and digging sticks. In recent years Glorine has made her home at Yuelamu (Mount Allan), north-east of Yuendumu. "I came back here because Yuelamu is a good place to live," she has said. "I came back to the country."

Glorine is a proud Warlpiri woman and painter, and her style is one of precision and symmetry. Glorine paints several significant Dreaming stories from her country, in particular Janmarra Jukurrpa - Bush Onion Dreaming. Glorine's paintings detail the importance of particular totemic bush foods and the ceremony of women collecting and preparing the nutritious tucker. Knowledge about the collection and preparation of these wild bush plants are customarily passed down from older women to the younger generations. Her bush food repertoire also extends to the Yajukurlu Jukurrpa: yajukurlu is the native pear, a small shrub that grows in the sandy soils near creek beds, its fruit eaten raw when ripe or cooked in the hot ashes of a fire.

The art centre Glorine's father helped establish gives her family's story its wider frame. Warlukurlangu — the name means "belonging to fire" in Warlpiri, after a Fire Dreaming site west of Yuendumu — grew into one of the oldest and most successful Aboriginal-owned art centres in Central Australia, its artists always painting Jukurrpa according to the proper Warlpiri relationships of kirda, the owners of a story, and kurdungurlu, its guardians. The Martin family painted within that system from the centre's early years: a 1994 collaborative Jukurrpa canvas by Andrea, painted with Kathleen Martin Nungarrayi, was acquired directly from Warlukurlangu that year by the American collector Richard Kelton, whose Kelton Foundation assembled one of the significant international collections of Western Desert art.

Glorine paints with significant cultural authority and a deep knowledge of her ancestral country, using the traditional dotting technique of the Central and Western desert art movements to create striking and high-contrast works.