Emily Kam Kngwarray

On the occasion of the exhibition Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country, presented in London in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary, writer Jennifer Higgie, artist and writer Amanda Thomson, and curator Tamsin Hong came together for a conversation, moderated by Vanessa Merlino, on Kngwarray’s work and its resonances with contemporary approaches to land, embodiment, and women’s knowledge systems. Kngwarray 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.