by Australia’s most significant Indigenous visual artists are often given a western narrative – a reductive paradigm through which they can be more easily understood, interpreted and written about. And as a celebrated practitioner at the forefront of the 1970s and 80s central desert art movement, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray (a whitefella first name, given to her as a teenager) is probably the best example.
The simple version goes something like this. Kngwarray only learned to sign her name (“Emilly”) in the late 1970s, around the same time she began to express herself through the visual arts, after being introduced to the mediums of batik and tie- dye. Then, in the 1980s, she switched to the more commercial (for dealers at least) and aesthetically valued medium of acrylic on canvas – and her fame and marketability went stratospheric.
Her distinctive depictions of her Australian desert homeland have attracted the attention of the global art world: galleries, 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 a female Australian artist.) These paintings were fundamentally inspired by the ecology and culture of her ancestral homeland and reflected completely them. , Alhalker, located within the borders of the middle desert region of Sandover, commonly known as Utopia. And yet, courtesy of her prolific output (many batiks and some 5,000 to 6,000 paintings) – and, today, a more lucrative global market than ever – her work is too often explained in an abstract and new context – western ageism.
But Kngwarray, who died in 1996 at the age of 82, is much more enigmatic. She worked in literal and figurative isolation from the western artists of her time but is still as collectable 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), offers an overdue perspective – and perhaps posthumous agency and dignity – to the artist and his a great achievement.
The many batiks and canvases in the exhibition cover the last 20 years of her life: two decades revealed through the exhibition’s essential documentary and catalog as part of a much longer and more complex creative and cultural story.
As part of the timeless human continuity of Anmatyerr, Kngwarray – together with the women of his community – represented the culture, history and ecology of Alhalker through stories of sand (finger marks in the sand, or kind) and “painting up” (ochre mixed with liver fat) on chest, chest and upper arm during women’s songs and ceremonies, or delightfully.
Kngwarray’s acrylics on canvas, his baits and tie dyes, the symbolic painting of the skin and the marks in the red earth, were all part of the continuum of his cultural and artistic expression.
Contextualizing Kngwarray outside the western art market and its curatorial traditions is ambitious and challenging. But for many years First Nations curators, Kelli Cole (of Warumungu/Luritja heritage) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte/Kalkadoon) came together and listened to women in and around Kngwarray country; women who are related to her, who knew her and created with her. Instructively, Cole and Perkins grew up in central Australia; Cole met Kngwarray, and the other female artists of his milieu, through family connections. Linguist Jennifer Green was also involved in this consultation process; she met Kngwarray in 1976 when she set up literacy courses in Utopia, which paved the way for the new arts and crafts movement that would eventually flourish.
And so this exhibition gives us Kngwarray firmly through the prism of her life – human, cultural, ecological, very historical, geographical – as matriarch, sister, friend, storyteller, visual artist and ever folk celebrant.
Nationally and internationally she is “Emily”. But in the desert land she is Kam (cam The buried seed pod is the back to back, or yam pencil) and Kngwarray (the name of her skin). The yam – its elaborate tubers criss-crossing underground, its tangled vines and yellow flowers above ground – and the local liver, anchorcelebrated by Anmatyerr, are recurring motifs in her works.
Kngwarray worked quickly, especially in her later years when her output was extremely prolific, almost urgent, and she used quick, thick, confident brushstrokes that earned her a disjointed cultural comparison with her colleagues in the Western. The batiks, diaphanous and dream-like, are distinguished by an unusual, delicate beauty.
Some of his canvases, such as Alhalker – Old Man Emu with Babies (which may have belonged to actor Steve Martin, a Kngwarray enthusiast), are detailed and captivating. But it is the internationally renowned mural-like blockers Yam Awely and Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), painted consecutively over two days and one day in 1995, that leap out from the white walls of the NGA and draws breath.
They certainly explain why contemporary collectors and dealers – who benefited greatly from Kngwarray’s paintings – were so smitten.
In their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Cole, Green and Perkins wrote: “The history of art in the west has affected the relationship with a continuous cultural tradition far more ancient than any that arose from European soil. Some who wrote about Kngwarray’s work struggled to resolve the origins of their artwork within the framework of their destination in the art market.”
Cole says that too often “consultation” from gathering institutions can be weighted against indigenous people. As curators, she says, they listened much more than they spoke.
In early 2023 Cole, Perkins and Green camped at Alhalker with a group of Kngwarray female descendants, some of whom traveled to Canberra for the opening of the NGA exhibition. The exhibition and catalog comprehensively describe the descendants’ memories of Kngwarray (they affectionately refer to her as “the old lady”) and the cultural significance of her work.
During that trip, Green played them recordings she made of Kngwarray talking and singing.
“They listened to it a few times and then they all started singing along,” says Cole. “Even though she’s gone, long gone, she’s 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 it belongs to that offspring – the people who live in Utopia. So when people are asking questions about Alhalker’s painting, you have to remember that it’s a residence and they have all these cultural obligations.” The IS delightfully ceremonies to which Kngwarray is so extensively referred to are still carried on today.
Although 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 work.
In her words: “I didn’t want to go through the hard batik work that was required – boiling the skeleton over and over again, lighting fires, and using the soap powder over and over again. That’s why I gave up batik and switched to canvas – it was easier.”
Kngwarray’s life was as extraordinary as his art, crossing as he did his first encounter with a whitefella (“devil”), the inhumane impact of pastoralism on the country, the lasting destructive legacy of colonialism on its people – and its relationship with another person. a global art market remains insurmountable for her work.
Ironically, perhaps Kam Kngwarray’s “Emily” – the exhibition that interprets her as she should be – could find her biggest audience in London, home of the empire that so threatened her country.
Maria Belshaw, the Tate’s director of museums and galleries, says she visited the community where Kngwarray lived and worked to talk to her descendants about the possibility of the exhibition going to Britain. She says that at first the women had many questions but that they were “supportive of the work of the old women coming to London … they were very enthusiastic about sharing their story more widely”.
Belshaw is “very much hoping” the women will come to London to see the exhibition. “We will have to help them travel,” she says. “We would love for them to be there to welcome Kngwarray’s work in London, just as much as it was here in Canberra.”
