Hailing from Utopia in Central Australia Margaret Loy Pula continues a legacy of sharing culture. Painting traditional stories handed down from her father she depicts her homelands, bush foods and ceremonial designs using a series of finely detailed dots.
Margaret Loy Pula paints her culture and her father’s dreaming. Her primary story is “Anatye” or Bush Potato dreaming. The painting portrays a plant that is an important food source to the Anmatyerre people of Central Australia. Margaret has been exposed to art for most of her life having grown up in the small community where she still resides.
She is the daughter of well known artist Kathleen Petyarre (dec) and the mother of Abie Loy Kemarre, also an artist from Utopia. Her aunties are the well known Petyarre sisters all of whom are established artists.
In 2012 Margaret Loy Pula was the first Indigenous artist to win the prestigious Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize in South Australia.
In 2011 she was the first female artist to win the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and in the same year the first female artist to win the Paddington Art Prize (Sydney).
In 2017 Margaret Loy Pula won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery and the Tattersall’s Art Prize in Brisbane.
Margaret Loy Pula has also won the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2013), Redland Art Prize (2014) and the Grace Cossington Smith Art Prize (2014). She has been a finalist in the Wynne Prize (2012), Sulman Prize (2013), Blake Prize (2013), Gold Coast Art Prize (2011), Fleurieu Art Prize (2013), Calleen Art Prize (2015).
Pula has held major exhibitions in New York and exhibited at some of the world’s top art fairs including Singapore, Miami, New York and Mexico City.
Image: ANATYE (BUSH POTATO), 121 x 182cm, acrylic on linen.
