Jacinda Hayes, Aboriginal Artist

Jacinda Hayes was born in 1992 at Woola Downs, an outstation of Ti Tree, north of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Jacinda is the granddaughter of renowned artist, Margaret Scobie.

The Bush Medicine Leaves design Jacinda paints carries a documented line of succession, and she stands at its current end. The style was made famous by Gloria Petyarre (dec.), Margaret's first cousin, and as Gloria faced health challenges she passed the Dreaming to Margaret to make sure the story would continue. Margaret, in turn, passed it to Jacinda — her eldest granddaughter — teaching her over long hours together how to handle colour and the brush. "This keeps the culture strong and keeps the connection," Jacinda says, and she intends to pass the Dreaming to her own children in the hope that they will hand it on again. The chain reaches further back still: Margaret herself was born at Woola Downs in 1948 — the very outstation where Jacinda was born forty-four years later — into one of the great painting families of Central Australia, with Emily Kame Kngwarreye her aunt and Kathleen, Anna and Ada Bird Petyarre among her relations.

Like her grandmother, Jacinda paints the Bush Medicine Leaf design. This design depicts the leaves drying on the ground after being plucked from the trees. Once the leaves are dry, the women grind them up and make medicine from them by mixing them with various animal fats to extract the essential medicinal oils. The leaves — from a native species of acacia — can also be boiled into a tea that helps settle stomach upsets, and the medicine remains in use today. Jacinda's brush strokes depicting the leaves drying in the sun create a mesmerising rhythm across the canvas.

Jacinda has since broadened her repertoire, taking up the story of the Thorny Devil as told to her by Gloria — the lizard Dreaming most closely associated with the Petyarre family — and developing a distinctive technique that moves between fine and broad brushstrokes to give her canvases both a three-dimensional presence and a free-flowing rhythm. In 2019 Jacinda relocated with her six children to Darwin for better schooling opportunities, and her works are now held in galleries across Australia and overseas.