A close relative of the women artists who made the Utopia school famous - Ada Bird Petyarre, Gloria Petyarre, Kathleen Petyarre and Emily Kngwarreye - Abie Loy Kemarre was born in 1972 in the heart of the Australian desert, where she has been offering superb colourful evocations since 1994.

Utopia began as a batik cooperative, and in the 1970s the women who ran it decided to reproduce on canvas the traditional motifs they had already created for their silk printing work. It was through these women that Abie Loy was introduced to painting - and to the secrets of the dreams that nourish it.

In this work, she is inspired by the body paintings used by herself and the women of her clan to celebrate the rites of which they are the guardians and which commemorate their Great Ancestors (plant, animal or human) and the episodes of the Dreamtime in which they took part, creating sacred sites and ceremonies, imposing themselves like so many totemic figures, and teaching laws, customs and artistic practices (dance, song, painting and sculpture).

The light background at the heart of the red "cells" evokes the very skin of the artist, who here offers a kind of indirect self-portrait, assimilating the support of the canvas to her own painted body to celebrate her personal and clan totems, such as the "bush hen" or the "sensitive", in whom she also sees a symbol of her own shyness.