An Anmatyerre woman from the Eastern Desert, Barbara Mbitjana Moore was born in 1964 and grew up in Tea Tree. She moved to Amata to live with her sister who is married to an Amata man. She works at the Health Clinic and first began to paint at Tjala Arts in April 2003. Originally painting in more iconographic style, Moore’s early 2000s works made a leap of imagery into more abstract works reminiscent of both famous Anmatyerre artists from the Utopia region and Pitjantjatjara artists from her adopted homeland of Tjala. In 2012 she won the Painting Award of the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards with one such painting described by the judges - artist Bindi Cole, Glen Iseger-Pilkington, curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and Roger Benjamin, Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney: “ Barbara Moore’s untitled work is a hyper-energetic celebration of country, which employs bold gesture, intense colour, and commanding scale. Moore locates sites of cultural significance within this painting. The energy of her orange and yellow brushstrokes keeps the eye circulating within the coloured space, as if drawn into a vortex. A work of great presence fueled by the artist’s connection to her country.”