Biography - Belinda Golder
Language: Anmatyerre
Country: Mulga Bore, Utopia, Central Australia
Belinda is an Anmatyerre artist from the Utopia Homelands of Central Australia. She was born in 1986 and her country is Mulga Bore.
Belinda has strong artistic connections within her family – her grandmother is leading Utopia artist Polly Ngale, and her mother Bessie Purvis Petyarre and sister Janet Golder are also accomplished artists. Artists Kathleen Ngale and Angelina Ngale are her great aunts.
Belinda paints the Bush Plum Dreaming story that she inherited from her paternal grandparents.
In the Dreaming story the bush plum seeds were blown all over the ancestral lands by the winds and they bore fruit on Utopia lands. The first anwekety of the Dreaming grew there and became part of the food of the Anmatyerre people.
Belinda’s technique is to render the many colours of the bush plum plant as the fruits ripen. The conkerberry is known as anwekety or bush plum. It is a sweet black berry and only grow on the plant (Carissa lanceolata) for a few weeks of the year, however Belinda's people collect plenty of them and store them dry, soaking them in water again before being consumed. The plant of the conkerberry is a tangled, spiny shrub that can grow up to 2m high. After rain fragrant white flowers bloom. This plant also bares medicinal properties. The orange inner bark from the roots can be soaked in water and the resultant solutions can be used as a medicinal wash. This is used mainly for skin and eye conditions
Belinda uses the painting techniques developed by master artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye to impart the many colours of the plant, seeds, flowers and fruit of the bush plum.