Composite portrait of Jennifer Higgie, Tamsin Hong, Amanda Thomson, and Vanessa Merlino

Pace Live

Emily Kam Kngwarray

A Conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Tamsin Hong, Amanda Thomson

Friday, June 6, 2025
4 PM
5 Hanover Square
London

EVENT DETAILS

Emily Kam Kngwarray: A Conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Tamsin Hong, Amanda Thomson
Friday, June 6, 2025
4 PM
5 Hanover Square
London

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On the occasion of the exhibition Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country, presented in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary, please join us for a conversation with writer Jennifer Higgie, artist and writer Amanda Thomson, and curator Tamsin Hong to discuss Kngwarray’s work and its resonances with contemporary approaches to land, embodiment, and women’s knowledge systems. Moderated by Vanessa Merlino, this event will take place on Friday, June 6, from 4:00 PM at Pace’s Hanover Square gallery in London.

Emily Kam Kngwarray (c. 1914–96) is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed contemporary artists. An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of her ancestral Country, Alhalker, she began working with batik in the 1970s before turning to painting in 1988. Over the next eight years, she produced an extraordinary body of work—around 3,000 paintings—that gave visual form to the rhythms, laws, and ancestral forces of her Country.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Country encompasses not only land, but also water, sky, living beings, and the cultural and spiritual responsibilities that bind them. Kngwarray’s work was rooted in the Dreaming—a living system of knowledge and creation—and her paintings embody this worldview, expressing an intimate and dynamic relationship with place.

Jennifer Higgie

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer and former editor of frieze magazine who lives in London. Her recent books include The Other Side: A Story of Women, Art and the Spirit World (2023) and The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of women's self-portraits (2021). Jennifer is the host of the National Gallery of Australia’s podcast, Artist’s Artists. Her five-part essay for BBC Radio 3, Artists and the Spirit World, is available on BBC iplayer.

Tamsin Hong

Tamsin Hong is a contemporary international art curator based in London. Hong’s research interests include women’s knowledge systems, embodied practices and re-indigenising theory. Born on unceded Ngunnawal Country on the land now known as Australia, Hong is Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine, London. Her recent projects Arpita Singh: Remembering (2025), Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States (2024) and Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015 (2023). She was formerly Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, specialising in performance, worked on African and Australian acquisitions, and co-curated the land rights exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992.

Amanda Thomson

Amanda Thomson is a Scottish artist and writer whose work explores ideas of home, place, and identity through the natural world. Working across printmaking, writing, film and sound, she brings a deeply personal and located perspective shaped by her life between Strathspey in the Scottish Highlands and Glasgow. Her books include A Scots Dictionary of Nature and Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2023. Boundary Layers, a short film-essay about nature’s reclamation of Ravenscraig, once Europe’s largest steelwork, was part of A Fragile Correspondence, Scotland’s exhibition in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Vanessa Merlino

Vanessa Merlino is the Head of Research at D’Lan Contemporary and holds degrees in Visual Arts, Art History, Art Curatorship, and Community Cultural Development from the University of Melbourne. Since 2005, Vanessa has worked closely with several of Australia’s most significant Indigenous artists in the Western Desert and APY Lands. In these roles, she has gained a rich understanding of artists and art centres, their functions in Indigenous communities, and their essential contributions to contemporary Australian art. This experience continues to inform her current work as a writer and curator.