Irene Entata is the best known and most acclaimed of the Hermannsburg Potters. Art and pottery were been a part of her life from childhood, when she experimented with plasticine at the Hermannsburg school. She later became a founding member of the Hermannsburg Potters. (Ant on climbing plant) illustrates the workers from a nest of honey ants (yerrampe in the Arrernte language), as they forage for food. Honey ants are a bush food that is readily found in the area around Hermannsburg. Nests of the various Myrmecocystus species are found in a diversity of arid or semi-arid environments around the world, and in central Australia they are commonly found under mulga trees. 
Certain female ants, called repletes, store nutrients gathered by the other members of the nest during good seasons. The abdomens of these living receptacles often swell to the size of a grape and, because of this, they are trapped in their underground chambers. When approached by worker ants, the repletes regurgitate a drop of the stored nectar. The honey ant was one of the few sources of sweetness available (the other was the nests of native bees) and was avidly sought by Indigenous people. This was a job for the women: to find honey ants, women follow the worker ants back to their nest, and then dig along the tunnels until they reach deep below ground, where the honey ants hang suspended from the ceilings of their chambers. As the sacs that hold the nectar are fragile, care has to be taken in transporting the ants back to the community to be eaten.(1)
Nests of the honey ants are particularly plentiful around the Papunya area (west of Alice Springs), which means 'Honey Ant Dreaming'. This work, along with (Bush orange) and Kuparda (bush plum), documents one of the traditional roles of  Indigenous women as they search for and gather bush foods. The bright colours and simplified forms confirm the tradition of a new decorative style that has been established at the Hermannsburg Pottery.     

Essay by Claire Gobé, former Curatorial Assistant, Australian Art and Glenn R Cooke,  former Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, April 2003.

Endnote

1. Lynne Baker, Mingkiri, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1998, pp.26–27.