Bethany Nelson Nabanangka b. 1982

Bethany Nelson Nabanangka grew up in the small community of Ti Tree, along the Stuart Highway, approximately 200km north of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in the Northern Territory.

Bethany's grandmother is from Utopia, a region of great cultural and artistic significance, and taught Bethany the traditions and stories of her country. Designs depicting aspects of Awelye, meaning women's ceremony, became popularised by artists from Utopia – particularly body paint designs. These are intricate patterns rooted in the ancient creation stories, or Dreamings, and are traditionally made by mixing coloured ochre pigments and animal fats, applied to women's chests and breasts in preparation for ceremony. It is the women's body paint design from this region that Bethany has chosen to depict in her paintings, and she intersperses this motif with the bush flowers from her country that bloom after the desert rains.

Bethany's connection to the Utopia painting tradition was strengthened again through marriage: she is the daughter-in-law of the late Jeannie Petyarre, one of Utopia's most widely collected artists, and her husband, Jeannie's son Dempsey Pula, also paints. Learning alongside the Petyarre family broadened Bethany's repertoire beyond her Awelye designs, and she now also paints Bush Medicine Leaves and Bush Yam — the subjects most closely associated with Jeannie — as well as the kurrajong tree and the desert flora of her Country. Bush medicine itself is knowledge held by the women: fruits, leaves and plants are gathered and mixed with animal fats to make remedies, in much the same way ochres and fats are combined for ceremonial body paint.

Painting these inherited subjects in her own hand, Bethany works with a fresh, high-keyed colour palette and rhythmic mark-making that gives her canvases a sense of shimmer and movement — the heat and light of the desert after rain. Her position is an interesting one within Central Desert art: raised at Ti Tree with a grandmother from Utopia, and married into a family at the heart of the Utopia movement, she draws on both her grandmother's Country and the artistic lineage of the Petyarres, carrying two strands of the region's women's painting culture into a new generation.

Bethany has four children, and is a self-taught and emerging artist.