Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Biography

One of Kngwarreye’s paintings bears the prints of a dog’s paws. Asked where they came from, a dealer explained simply: the dog had walked across the canvas, and the artist couldn’t have cared less. The canvas lay on the ground; she sat on it cross-legged and reached the middle with a long brush. Almost all her paintings were made this way.

She was born around 1910 (some sources give 1914) at Alhalkere, on the Utopia lands, about 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, the youngest of three children in an Anmatyerre family. From her youth she worked on cattle stations; in June 1934 she moved to MacDonald Downs homestead, about a hundred kilometres to the east, where she worked in the house and mustered cattle. She had no children of her own. For seven years she brought up her niece, the future artist Barbara Weir, until the girl was taken away under a government programme of forced assimilation of children of mixed descent.

As an elder and a custodian of tradition, she had painted for ceremonies for decades: on sand and on the body. European materials came late. In the 1970s she took short adult courses in fabric dyeing, and in 1977 she began learning batik with the artist Yipati from Ernabella and the instructors Suzanne Bryce, Jenny Green and Julia Murray. Bryce and Green had brought batik to the Northern Territory from Indonesia in 1974, and the local women quickly remade the technique to suit themselves: instead of the Indonesian canting, a pen-like tool, they applied the wax with a brush, and the patterns came out broader and livelier. Until then women here had mostly assisted male artists. In 1978 about twenty-one women, Kngwarreye among them, founded the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. The first exhibition of her silk batiks was held in 1980, and in 1981 they appeared in the exhibition “Floating Forests of Silk” in Adelaide. These fabrics already hold everything that would later pass onto the canvases: awelye (body designs), emus, goannas, the plants of her land.

In the summer of 1988–1989 Rodney Gooch of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) handed out a hundred canvases and paints to the women of Utopia. In four weeks eighty artists painted eighty-one pictures; the Holmes à Court Collection bought them all, and in April they were shown in Sydney at the S. H. Ervin Gallery. Kngwarreye herself later explained the switch without any ceremony: batik meant boiling the fabric over and over, lighting fires and using up washing powder, her eyes were weakening with age, and canvas was easier to work on.

After that everything moved very fast. More than three thousand paintings in eight years, roughly one a day. Her first solo exhibition came in 1990 at Utopia Art Sydney; in 1992–1993 she held a fellowship awarded by Prime Minister Paul Keating and the Australia Council. The early canvases are painted in red and yellow ochre, black and white; by 1990 grey, purple and brown appear. In 1992 the dots merge into lines, and the painting becomes a grid of multicoloured stripes that look like riverbeds and desert terrain. In 1993 patches of colour are laid over the dots and turn into rings; Kngwarreye called this manner, with its very bright colours, painted with a shaving brush, “dump dump”. The “Alhalkere Suite” dates from the same time, twenty-two canvases about her land after a flood. In the mid-1990s she moves on to broad bands of paint, and these are, I think, her most deceptive works: they look like pure abstraction, but they are in fact awelye, the designs that Anmatyerre women paint on the body for ceremony.

Her middle name, Kame, means the yellow flower and seeds of the anwerlarr yam. She often began a painting with the lines along which people search for its roots.

In 1995 she painted “Big Yam Dreaming”, a canvas more than eight metres long and almost three metres high. Two weeks before her death she asked her nephew Fred Torres to bring her materials and, dipping an inch-wide brush in a pot of paint, painted twenty-four canvases in a few days. They are now known as “My Country – Final Series, 1996”. Even in her lifetime journalists were writing that many paintings passed off as hers were in fact forgeries.

Kngwarreye died on 3 September 1996. In 1997 Australia was represented at the Venice Biennale by the exhibition “Fluent”, with her works and those of Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson. The first retrospective, in 1998, was organised in Queensland by the curator Margo Neale, and it was the first major national touring retrospective of an Aboriginal artist. In 2000 her paintings travelled to the Hermitage in St Petersburg as part of an exhibition from the National Gallery of Australia. The large 2023 retrospective in Canberra, put together by the Aboriginal curators Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins, pushed back against the habit of seeing her as an abstract painter and returned the paintings to the land of Alhalkere; in 2025 the exhibition moved to Tate Modern in London.