Gloria Petyarre is an Anmatyerre woman born in 1945. Her country is Mulga Bore in the Utopia region of the north-east desert region of the Northern Territory, approx 240k from Alice Springs. Her seven sisters include painters Ada Bird Petyarre and Kathleen Petyarre. Since she started painting in the mid 1990s she has become one of the most consistently well-known Australian Indigenous painters. A leading member of the Utopia batik group in the 1980s, she travelled to Ireland, England, France, Thailand and India representing the Utopia women with the exhibition that showed these works, Utopia – A Picture Story, the Holmes à Court Collection, 1990. Since, Petyarre has become one of the most widely exhibited Utopia artists whose works have been exhibited in hundreds of galleries around Australia and internationally. In the early 1990s, she established the style of ‘bush medicine leaf’ painting which has since become a highly popular style for women painters in the area. In 1995 she won the Wynne Prize for Landscape painting at AGNSW with one such work – a large 10 panelled work called Leaves blowing in the wind. With their swirling patterns created by hundreds of short brush-strokes of varying lengths, she has described these works as deriving from thoughts of a still quiet place in her country and the movement of the leaves in the winds. Her medicine leaf paintings also derive from the use of the leaves in traditional medicine and her knowledge and status as a healer.