“When I go out bush, to hunt and visit country I always look for the bush flowers. I collect these and bring them home, so I can have some of the outside, inside, in the kitchen or the lounge room. My Flower Paintings show the bush flowers inside, like some whitefella paintings I’ve seen”.

Lindy Brodie’s practice has long involved collecting bush medicine and tuckers for detailed studies. Her love of bush flowers and her interest in art history inspired her to incorporate these studies into domestic scenes in what she dubs Flower Paintings.

With her Flower Paintings Brodie portrays elements of the desert landscape within her home. Brodie’s process involves painting compositions of bush flowers in vases or mugs among the trappings of daily life.

In adopting the genre of Still Life painting to depict bush medicine and flowers, Brodie portrays elements of Indigenous knowledge within the paradigm of Western visual culture.

Lindy Nungarrayi Brodie is a Waramungu woman from Alroy Downs. Lindy began her career in Alice Springs at Jukurrpa Arts before moving to Tennant Creek to join Julalikari Arts in 2003. Finally, she joined Barkly Regional Arts in 2012, becoming a founding member of the Tartukula Artists.

Lindy’s life is closely linked to the Barkly Region and her work speaks to her deep knowledge of her land and its history. Lindy’s work often depicts human intervention on country, whether it be the history of her family living on her Grandfather’s country during the 1940s, planes flying far above country or most notably, illustrations of the Ghan travelling through the Barkly region; a body of work for which she came to pre-eminence. Throughout her career Lindy has constantly returned to biblical imagery, reflecting her strong belief born from her childhood on station, where religious instruction was strictly followed and the influence of her mentor, fellow Tartukula artist, Susannah Nakamarra Neslon, who taught Lindy to paint using her own vivid religious imagery.

With her signature use of cadmium orange, reflecting the colour of the earth, Lindy builds texture with layers and layers of paint, slowly adding details to reflect the unique features of the land around the Barkly; spinifex, ant pits and eucalypt with bright white trunks are scattered throughout her paintings, which bare strong resemblance to the landscape, despite the degree of abstraction which Lindy injects into her work. Human intervention constantly makes itself known with the presence of trains, planes, cars and people.