Abie Loy is one of the new generation of artists living in the Utopia community, in the heart of the Australian desert. She began painting in 1994 on the advice of her grandmother, the famous Kathleen Petyarre, who guided her in her first works, inspired by the ‘dreams’ of which she is the ritual guardian.

The ‘dream of the sensitive’ that inspired the artist was dictated by religious imperatives: this plant is linked to a sacred territory for which Abie Loy and her family are responsible. By staging it, she is demonstrating her ritual “ownership” of the site where the sensitive plant grows, and fulfilling a duty to remember, since it was her great-ancestors who created the place and grew the plant there.

The plant that grows in the summer is also a symbol of fertility in a region with a climate that is often arid, and to devote a painting to it is bo