Joycie Morton Petyarre b. 1976

Joycie Morton was born in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in 1976 and is from Ampilatwatja in the expansive Indigenous homelands region of Utopia, some 325km north-east of Mparntwe. Joycie is connected to significant artistic families, the Petyarres and the Pwerles - she is the daughter of artist Betty Morton Pwerle. Joycie's daughter, Nakita Inkamala, is also a very talented emerging artist.

Characteristic of the Indigenous tradition of oral storytelling and the passing down of cultural knowledge, Joycie says that she learned many aspects of her traditional life from her grandmother – hunting, collecting bush tucker, and the stories, law and Dreamings of her country. She also learned bush medicine from her grandmother, which is the subject of her brightly coloured canvases. That grandmother has her own place in Utopia's art history: big Betty Kemarre was among the women involved in the Utopia Women's Batik Group, the landmark project of the late 1970s and 80s from which the region's painting movement grew. "I learnt everything from my grandmother," Joycie says — "hunting, bush tucker, dreamings, bush medicine and painting." Joycie took up the brush herself at nineteen, and the bush medicine story runs through both sides of her upbringing: her mother Betty, an award-winning artist raised in Irrultja country, inherited the medicine story from her own father, and shares it now with Joycie — three generations holding the one body of knowledge, each teaching the next.

Joycie depicts the abundance of her country, the native botanicals that are treasured by Indigenous people of the arid desert regions for their healing qualities. There are many ways that bush medicine can be prepared and used to treat a variety of ailments – some plants are worked into a balm or ointment that soothes skin infections, others boiled in water for a medicinal drink to help with coughs and colds, or to inhale the healing vapour - Joycie says this alpunga is "good for the soul". As she puts it: "There are lots of different medicines, we know what their stories are, we learnt them from our parents and we teach these stories to our children."

That pattern of transmission continues in Joycie's own household. Her husband, Eric Inkamala, is also an artist, and of their seven children — five daughters and two sons — it is Nakita who has taken up painting most seriously; mother and daughter began painting for galleries together in 2017, entering the art world side by side just as Joycie once learned at her grandmother's elbow.

Joycie paints with a combination of brushwork and a meticulous dotting technique, and is a skilled colourist, often layering and blending different colours into the same stroke, contributing to the vibrancy of her work.