by A Western history is invariably grafted onto Australia’s most prominent Indigenous visual artists, a reductionist paradigm through which they can be more easily understood, interpreted and written about. And as a celebrated practitioner at the forefront of the central desert art movement of the 1970s and 1980s, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray (a whitefella given name, attributed to her as a teenager) is perhaps her best example.
The simple version is something like this. Kngwarray only learned to sign his name (“Emillly”) in the late 1970s, around the same time he began to express himself through visual art, after learning about the mediums of batik and tie-dye. Then, in the 1980s, he transitioned to the more commercial (at least for dealers) and aesthetically valued medium, acrylic on canvas, and his notoriety and sellability became stratospheric.
His distinctive depictions of his homeland in the Australian desert captured the amazement of the global art world: gallerists, curators and especially art dealers. (In 2017, a painting by Kngwarray, The Creation of Earth I, sold for $2.1 million, breaking the record for the highest auction price for an Australian artist.) These paintings were intrinsically inspired and fully reflected the ecology and culture of her ancestral country. , Alhalker, which lies within the boundaries of the Sandover region of the central desert, commonly known as Utopia. And yet, thanks to his prodigious output (many batiks and approximately 5,000 to 6,000 paintings) – and, today, a global market more lucrative than ever – his work has too often been explained in the context of Western abstraction and modernism.
But Kngwarray, who died in 1996 aged 82, is much more enigmatic. He worked in literal and figurative isolation from the Western artists of his day and yet remains as collectible as some of the biggest names.
Emily Kam Kngwarray, a stunning retrospective opening this week at the National Gallery of Australia (it will travel to London’s Tate Modern in July 2025), brings long-awaited perspective – and perhaps posthumous agency and dignity – to the artist and her phenomenal work.
The numerous batiks and canvases in the exhibition cover the last 20 years of his life: two decades that, through the documentary and the essential catalog of the exhibition, are revealed as part of a much longer and more complex creative and cultural history.
As part of a timeless human continuity of Anmatyerr, Kngwarray – together with the women of her community – reflected the culture, history and ecology of Alhalker through sand stories (finger marks in the sand, or typographic) and “painting” (ocher mixed with emu fat) on the breasts, chest and upper arms during women’s songs and ceremonies, or incredibly.
Kngwarray’s acrylics on canvas, his batiks and tie-dyes, the symbolic painting of skin and markings in red earth, were part of the continuum of his cultural and artistic expression.
Contextualizing Kngwarray outside of the Western art market and its curatorial traditions is ambitious and challenging. But for many years, First Nations healers Kelli Cole (of Warumungu/Luritja heritage) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte/Kalkadoon) met and listened to women in and around Kngwarray country; women who relate, met and created with her. Instructively, Cole and Perkins grew up in central Australia; Cole met Kngwarray and other female artists around her through family connections. Linguist Jennifer Green also participated in this consultation process; She met Kngwarray in 1976 when she established literacy courses in Utopia., which would pave the way for the budding arts and crafts movement that would eventually flourish.
And so, this exhibition brings us firmly closer to Kngwarray through the prism of her world (human, cultural, ecological, deeply historical, geographical) as matriarch, sister, friend, storyteller, visual artist and ever celebrant of the country.
At the national and international level she is “Emily”. But in the desert country she is Kam (Kam It is the buried seed pod of the anweerlarr, or pencil yam) and Kngwarray (his skin name). The yam (its elaborate criss-crossing underground tubers, tangled vines and above-ground yellow flowers) and the local emu, ankerrcelebrated by Anmatyerr, are repetitive motifs in his works.
Kngwarray worked quickly, especially in her later years, when her output was more prolific, almost urgent, and she employed quick, thick, sure brushstrokes that drew her into culturally disjointed comparison with her Western contemporaries. The batiks, diaphanous and dreamlike, are distinguished by an extraordinary and delicate beauty.
Some of his canvases, such as Alhalker – Old Man Emu with Babies (owned by actor Steve Martin, an avowed Kngwarray enthusiast), are finely detailed and fascinating. But it is the huge, internationally renowned blockbusters Yam Awely and Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), painted consecutively over two days and a single day in 1995, that jump off the white walls of the NGA and take your breath away.
They certainly explain why contemporary collectors and dealers, who have benefited so much from Kngwarray’s paintings, were so captivated by her.
In their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Cole, Green and Perkins write: “The history of Western art was confounded by its encounter with a continuous cultural tradition far older than any that has emerged on European soil. Some of those who have written about Kngwarray’s work have struggled to reconcile the origins of his artworks within the framework of their eventual destinies in the art market.
Cole says that too often the “consultation” of tax collection institutions can harm indigenous peoples. As curators, he says, they listened much more than they talked.
In early 2023, Cole, Perkins and Green camped at Alhalker with a group of female Kngwarray descendants, some of whom traveled to Canberra for the opening of the NGA exhibition. The exhibition and catalog extensively recount the memories of Kngwarray’s descendants (they respectfully refer to her as “the old woman”) and the cultural importance of her work.
During that trip, Green showed them recordings he had made of Kngwarray speaking and singing.
“They heard it a couple of times and then they all started singing along with it,” Cole says. “Even though she has passed away, and she has long since passed away, she is still alive in spirit and still teaching those songs to those women again. It was a very emotional experience and something really beautiful for us.
“Not many people understand this, but Kngwarray painted his country… but that country belongs to those descendants, to those people who live in Utopia. So when people ask about the Alhalker painting, you have to remember that it is a living place and they have all those cultural obligations.” He incredibly The ceremonies that Kngwarray refers to so much are still carried out today.
While Kngwarray’s creative life was an ongoing cultural expression, he was also ultimately practical in the medium he chose for his last and most famous works.
In her words: “I didn’t want to continue with the hard work that batik required: boiling the cloth over and over, lighting fires, and consuming all the soap powder, over and over again. That’s why I left batik and switched to canvas: it was easier.”
Kngwarray’s life was as extraordinary as his art, encompassing his first contact with a whitefella (“a devil”), the inhumane impact of pastoralism on his country, the devastating and lasting legacy of colonialism on his people – and his interface with a The global art market remains insatiable for his work.
Perhaps ironically, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray – the exhibition that interprets her as she should be – may find its largest audience in London, home of the empire that so threatened her country.
Maria Belshaw, director of Tate museums and galleries, says she visited the community where Kngwarray lived and worked to talk to his descendants about the possibility of the exhibition going to Britain. She says that initially the women had many questions, but then “they became supportive of the old lady’s work coming to London…then they became very enthusiastic about sharing her story more widely.”
Belshaw is “very hopeful” that women will come to London to see the exhibition. “We’ll have to help them travel,” she says. “We would really love them to be there to see Kngwarray’s work welcomed in London, as much as it has been here in Canberra.”
