Encountering Kngwarray

The twelve works by Emily Kam Kngwarray in My Country skip across the surface of the artist’s brilliant oeuvre like stones across a pond, suspended above the ripple of circumstance, art, and genius that shaped the artist’s career.

Thirty years on, and notwithstanding three major surveys, Kngwarray’s oeuvre remains largely unexamined in any great detail. In her case, a catalogue raisonné represents a challenging art historical project, an almost “too big” story. Unlike many artists who largely work sequentially with their commissioners, patrons, and gallerists, Kngwarray’s essential practice—particularly in the second half of her career—was to paint for more than one commissioner at the same time. As her career reached its halfway mark in 1992, the field of people wanting to obtain work from Kngwarray exponentially increased along with her ever-advancing popularity and the demand for her work.

Tracking sequences and the threads of process and practice is a routine aspect of mapping the works of any artist—until, in the case of Kngwarray, you find yourself amidst prodigious numbers and a highly-compressed chronology, both routinely, if vaguely, cited at around 3000 or more works in 8 years. Yet, nothing about Kngwarray’s oeuvre or its diverse commissioning origins is typical. Not only was she an original and energetic visual thinker, she also pioneered new ways of working freelance with commissioning agents—all without the support of an art center.

In many respects, Kngwarray was as prodigious and creatively prodigal as Picasso. She emerged from the periphery—from a remote Centralian batik co-operative and two landmark Utopia CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) art projects—to become an art world superstar. A recent exhibition catalogue, 65,000 Years: A short History of Australian Art, questions why Kngwarray should have reached the heights she did, when so many women in the Utopia community were spectacular artists. Their conclusion suggests that it was “a good dose of luck, serendipity, and fate” [1] that brought Kngwarray to the fore. However, the fact that it was Emily and no one else is highly significant. Confounding her audience, the often-referred to “little old lady” crossed a post-colonial Rubicon into the Western art world: Kngwarray had what it took and the desire to get there—a big personality, huge talent, great energy, and the culturally deep authority to make the journey. Reputed to have produced around 100,000 works, Picasso was painting up a storm in his youth. Kngwarray was in her late seventies when she embarked on her around 3,000-painting oeuvre.

From mid-1989 on, with some absences from the field, Kngwarray seems to have painted on an almost daily basis, often producing more than one canvas in a session. Multiple works, a canvas or two, might be painted for several agents or more canvases produced for a single agent working towards an exhibition. The works in this exhibition are provenanced to her two foremost agents: Rodney Gooch—Manager of CAAMA, coordinator of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, and founder of Mulga Bore Artists in 1991—and Donald and Janet Holt, who established Delmore Gallery in 1989 on their family-held pastoral lease, Delmore Downs, adjacent to Utopia.

Two paintings from Delmore, both titled Harmony of Spring and painted in February 1990, appear to be “same session" works. They have adjacent Delmore registration codes—0G09 and 0G10—identical titles and are stylistically interconnected. The layering of lines and dots in 0G10 (Pace Gallery 95149) and the special circular zones of interest in a contrasting palette reprise elements of Kngwarray’s 1987 batik, Untitled – Alhalker, also included in My Country. These densely worked paintings are characteristic of a number of works Kngwarray made for Delmore in late 1989 and early 1990. In all three, Kngwarray is being a naturalist in her own Country, intensely focused on the details of life teeming on the ground, observing its cycles of creation and renewal.

Other paintings in the exhibition, such as the chromatic Untitled (1994), show Kngwarray’s lyrical phase, in which tranches of “shuffled” dots merge and drift from a central line across the canvas. In strong contrast with the poetry of these works is another Untitled from the same year, which features body paint designs in red and orange—the traditional colors of Alhalker. Striped paintings like this work are descendants of the ceremonial body paint designs women apply to their breasts and upper body. Gooch was the first to suggest this theme to Kngwarray, and the resulting set of black stripes on white paper was immediately acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. While these “body stripe” paintings became a central focus of Gooch’s commissioning repertoire in 1994, they are rarer amongst the Delmore commissions—perhaps a matter of preference and differentiation.

All throughout Kngwarray’s painting career, there was much rivalry and secrecy around commissioning activities. The opening of the 1998 retrospective Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia curated by Margo Neale at the Queensland Art Gallery was the first occasion that agents, insiders, and the public got to see what she had been painting for others, beyond their own circle of interest. Much of it was also a revelation to those of her community who attended. Underpinning the extent of this achievement was a demanding level of activity, one that required Kngwarray to be her own boss, negotiate her terms, and organize a demanding physical and creative workload.

To talk about Kngwarray only in terms of the number of canvases she painted over eight years does not factor in the numerous batiks she produced in the decade between 1978 and 1988—before she first began to use paint and canvas. Many of these batiks—sarongs, T-shirts, singlets, and scarves—will not have survived their ephemeral origins as images drawn in dyes and wax on fabric. However, it is reasonable to expect that, in the future, more works like Untitled – Alhalker (1987) will emerge from the obscurity of a bottom drawer or cupboard somewhere.

Kngwarray’s batik legacy receded into the background when her first work on canvas, Emu Woman painted in the summer of 1988-89, began to attract attention; the change of medium momentarily obscured the many continuities of content and form between her batik and painting. This disjuncture also masked Kngwarray’s creative momentum and aesthetic habitus in both mediums.

Several large-scale batiks by Kngwarray have made their way into major collections, public and private, including a 112 x 1000 cm silk from 1988—which will be included in Tate Modern’s major survey of the artist, opening in July 2025. Flowing like a river, this feat of scale and composition is all the more extraordinary for being created section by section, drawn across the artist’s knees as she sat cross-legged on the ground. Seven years later, in 1995, the National Gallery of Victoria’s Anwerlarr anganenty (1995) [formerly titled Big Yam Dreaming] was painted by Kngwarray sitting in the same cross-legged position but moving around the canvas. Measuring 291.1 x 805.8 cm, Anwerlarr anganenty has many parallels with its counterpart, the large 1988 silk batik, including, but not only, its scale. Painted at Delmore Downs before an audience of admirers from the art world, this monumental work on canvas generated many offshoots among subsequent Delmore commissions.

White on black or black on white was the favoured palette of this new generation of curvilinear yam paintings, one of which, Anooralya Yam (1995), is in the exhibition. There is also a multi-colored Yam Dreaming from the same year, representing an evolution of the curvilinear version of the motif—deploying sharper angles and arcs that persist in Kngwarray’s representation of this theme throughout 1995 and 1996. This style of yam imagery is a characteristic feature of the Delmore commissions. In the last sequence that she painted for them in July – August 1996—not long before she died—are a number of minimalist versions executed, like Yam Awelye—Blue, in a single color, red or blue, on a black primed canvas. The brush work in all these paintings is executed with singular energy.

This exhibition includes five other batiks by women in Kngwarray’s community. With the exception of the late Lena [Pula] Pwerle, a senior custodian of Alyawarr country, the other four were the youngest participants in the batik survey project Utopia. A Picture Story that reached its conclusion in mid-1988. Judy Greenie Ngwarai [Judith Kngwarrray] had close ties to Emily Kam Kngwarray, being the daughter of the artist’s nephew, Greenie Purvis Petyarre.

In March 2023, as a prelude to the showing of Kngwarray’s work in the NGA exhibition, Judy Greenie Ngwarai and several of her countrywomen visited the Janet Holmes à Court Collection in Perth, where many of the community’s seminal projects —batiks, paintings and watercolors are held. Some present had contributed a painting to a Gooch-commissioned project on the theme of the yam, in which all participants had followed Kngwarray’s signature yam design. I was curious to see if any of the visitors would remember their paintings. Instead, when the rack was pulled out, they were overwhelmed by the power of this wall with Kngwarray’s signature all over it. There was great emotion in the room. The fact that the work Kngwarray’s nieces are resting their hands on was the third the artist had painted that day—to everyone else’s one—and entirely different to the first was of no matter at all. This was about Alhalker, Emily, and the Yam.

1. Coby Edgar, “Turn to the River,” in 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, ed. Marcia Langton and Judith Ryan (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2024), 67.