A western story is invariably grafted on to Australia’s most prominent Indigenous visual artists – a reductive paradigm through which they can be more easily understood, interpreted and written about. And as a practitioner celebrated at the vanguard of the 1970s and 80s central desert art movement, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray (a whitefella first name, attributed to her in her teens) is perhaps the greatest example.
The simple version goes something like this. Kngwarray only learned to sign her name (“Emillly”) in the late 1970s, about the same time that she began expressing herself through visual art, after being introduced to the mediums of batik and tie-dye. Then, in the 1980s, she transitioned to the more commercial (for dealers at least) and aesthetically valued medium of acrylic on canvas – and her notoriety and saleability went stratospheric.
Her distinctive depictions of her Australian desert homelands captured the awe of the global art world: gallerists, curators and especially art dealers. (In 2017 a painting by Kngwarray, Earth’s Creation I, sold for $2.1m, breaking the record for the highest auction price for an Australian female artist.) These paintings were intrinsically inspired by and wholly reflective of the ecology and culture of her ancestral country, Alhalker, which rests inside the borders of the central desert’s Sandover region, commonly referred to as Utopia. And yet, courtesy of her prodigious output (many batiks and an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 paintings) – and, today, a more lucrative than ever global market – her work has too often been explained in the context of western abstraction and modernism.
But Kngwarray, who died in 1996 aged 82, is far more enigmatic. She worked in literal and figurative isolation from the western artists of her epoch and yet remains as highly collectible as some of the biggest names.
Emily Kam Kngwarray, a stunning retrospective that this week opens at the National Gallery of Australia (it will travel to London’s Tate Modern in July 2025), brings overdue perspective – and perhaps posthumous agency and dignity – to the artist and her phenomenal oeuvre.
The many batiks and canvases in the exhibition cover the last 20 years of her life: two decades which are revealed through the exhibition’s essential documentary and catalogue to be part of a much longer and more complex creative and cultural story.
As part of a timeless Anmatyerr human continuity, Kngwarray – along with the women of her community – reflected Alhalker culture, history and ecology through sand stories (finger markings in the sand, or tyepety) and “painting up’’ (ochres mixed with emu fat) on breasts, chests and upper arms during women’s song and ceremonies, or awely.
Kngwarray’s acrylics on canvas, her batiks and tie-dyes, the symbolic painting of skin and markings in the red earth, were all part of the continuum of her cultural and artistic expression.
Contextualising Kngwarray outside the western art market and its curatorial traditions is ambitious and challenging. But for many years First Nations curators Kelli Cole (Warumungu/Luritja) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte/Kalkadoon) met and listened to women in and around Kngwarray’s country; women who are related to, knew and created with her. Instructively, Cole and Perkins grew up in central Australia; Cole encountered Kngwarray, and the other female artists of her milieu, through family connections. The linguist Jennifer Green was also involved in this consultation process; she met Kngwarray in 1976 when she established literacy courses in Utopia, which would pave the way for the fledgling art and craft movement that would eventually flourish.
And so this exhibition brings us Kngwarray firmly through the prism of her world – human, cultural, ecological, deeply historic, geographic – as matriarch, sister, friend, storyteller, visual artist and always celebrant of country.
Nationally and internationally she is “Emily”. But in desert country she is Kam (kam is the buried seed pod of the anweerlarr, or pencil yam) and Kngwarray (her skin name). The yam – its elaborate crisscrossing underground tubers, aboveground its entangled vines and yellow flowers – and the local emu, ankerr, celebrated by Anmatyerr, are repetitive motifs in her works.
Kngwarray worked quickly, especially in her final years when her output was most prolific, almost urgent, and employed swift, thick, confident brushstrokes that brought her such culturally disjointed comparison with western contemporaries. The batiks, diaphanous and dream-like, are distinguished by an extraordinary, delicate beauty.
Some of her canvases, such as Alhalker – Old Man Emu with Babies (owned by the actor Steve Martin, an avowed Kngwarray enthusiast), are finely detailed and mesmerising. But it’s the huge, mural-like, 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 NGA’s white walls and draw breath.
They certainly explain why contemporary collectors and dealers – who have profited so profoundly from Kngwarray’s paintings – were so in her thrall.
In their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Cole, Green and Perkins write: “The history of western art was confounded by its encounter with a continuing cultural tradition much more ancient than any that has sprung from European soil. Some who have written about Kngwarray’s work have struggled to reconcile the origins of her works of art within the framework of their eventual destinations in the art market.”
Cole says that too often “consultation” from collecting institutions can be weighted against Indigenous people. As curators, she says, they listened far more than they talked.
In early 2023 Cole, Perkins and Green camped at Alhalker with a group of Kngwarray’s female descendants, some of whom travelled to Canberra for the opening of the NGA exhibition. The exhibition and catalogue extensively recounts the descendants’ memories of Kngwarray (they refer to her respectfully as “the old lady”) and the cultural importance of her work.
During that trip, Green played them recordings she had made of Kngwarray talking and singing.
“They listened to it a couple of times and then they all started singing with her,” Cole says. “Even though she’s passed, and she has been passed for a long time, she is still alive in spirit and still teaching those women those songs again. It was a very emotional experience and a really beautiful thing for us.
“Not many people get this, but Kngwarray painted her country … but that country belongs to those descendants – those people who are living at Utopia. So when people are asking about the painting of Alhalker, you’ve got to remember that it’s a living place and that they have all of those cultural obligations.” The awely ceremonies that Kngwarray references so extensively are still taking place today.
While Kngwarray’s creative life was one of continuous cultural expression, she was also ultimately practical about the medium she chose for her last and most famous works.
In her words: “I didn’t want to continue with the hard work batik required – boiling the fabric over and over, lighting fires, and using up all the soap powder, over and over. That’s why I gave up batik and changed over to canvas – it was easier.”
Kngwarray’s life was as extraordinary as her art, straddling as it did her first contact with a whitefella (“a devil”), the inhumane impact of pastoralism on to country, the devastating lasting legacy of colonialism on her people – and her interface with a global art market still insatiable for her work.
Ironically, perhaps, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray – the exhibition which interprets her as she should be – might get its biggest audiences in London, home of the empire that so threatened her country.
Maria Balshaw, director of Tate museums and galleries, says she visited the community where Kngwarray lived and worked to speak with her descendants about the possibility of the exhibition going to Britain. She says initially the women had many questions but then were “supportive of the old lady’s work coming to London … they were then very enthusiastic about sharing her story more widely”.
Balshaw is “very much hoping”’ the women will come to London to see the exhibition. “We will need to help them travel,” she says. “We would really love them to be there to see Kngwarray’s work welcomed by London, just as much as it has been here in Canberra.”
Emily Kam Kngwarray is open at the National Gallery of Australia from 2 December 2023 until 24 April 2024
