Emily Kam Kngwarray

One of the most important Aboriginal painters of the twentieth century, Emily Kam Kngwarray (b. 1910 - 1996) began painting in earnest in her early seventies. Emily Kam Kngwarray’s oeuvre was inspired by her role as an Anmatyerre elder and her custodianship of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere. Millenia-old women’s lore is preserved and inherited through both storytelling and visual traditions, including designs painted on human bodies, traced in the earth, or carved into the landscape.

 

Despite finding her spirited vocation in the final years of her life, Emily Kam Kngwarray’s works on canvas sparkle with the broad mythopoetry of the landscape and a full knowledge of her country: its ritual ceremonies, cultivation and harvest, spiritual forces and ancient lore. As a custodian of her sacred country, Emily Kam Kngwarray’s painting captures both minutia and vastness: from grains of sand and seed pods to the vastness of the sky and terrain. Her middle name, Kam, denotes the sustaining pencil yam and its seeds—Emily’s totem, and the motivating force of her oeuvre. 

 

The artist referred to this simultaneous evocation as the 'whole lot'. Emily Kam Kngwarray’s ability to capture such depth of meaning came from her traditional upbringing, largely untouched by Western influence until the late stages of her life. Emily Kam Kngwarray’s painting developed through the ceremonial communication of the Dreaming. Her style is drawn from the body painting iconography of the Anmatyerre women’s ceremony called Awelye. During Awelye, Anmatyerre women painted Dreaming designs on their chests and shoulders using pigments ground from the earth - a fusion of earth and body. As they paint these designs, they chant their Dreaming, which can last for many hours, culminating in a final dance and chant. During the late 1970s, Anmatyerre women performed Awelye to demonstrate their ownership of territories, stories and Dreamings, which played a critical role in reclaiming their rights to the land. Following the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, Emily Kam Kngwarray and her naitive Anmatyerre community returned to their ancestral homelands and continued to live according to the laws and customs of the clan. In 1977, Emily Kam Kngwarray and other artists formed the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, whose members developed techniques to reimagine Awelye body painting into batik decoration on silk. Emily Kam Kngwarray continued to paint Awelye designs after she and the other Utopian artists started using acrylic paint on canvas in the late 1980s, whilst developing a painterly ‘allover style’ of gestural swipes and clotted dotting.

 

Emily Kam Kngwarray is unique among Indigenous Australian painters for her prolific and innovative style, matched with a revered and distinctive color-sense. Working on intimate and monumental scales alike, the artist employed brushes, sticks, and fingertips on unstretched linen laid flat on the ground, sitting beside or within the composition itself. Emily Kam Kngwarray has been the subject of several museum surveys in Australia and Japan, and her work featured prominently in the 56th Biennale di Venezia in 2015.

 

Her work will also be the subject of a major one-person exhibition at Tate Modern in July 2025, curated in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia.