- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this story contains images and names of deceased persons.
An Emily Kam Kngwarray painting is unmistakable.
Known for her vibrant, large-scale canvases depicting desert landscapes, the late Anmatyerr painter exploded onto the international art scene in the late 80s and would go on to become the highest-selling female artist in Australian history.
With work held in public and private collections all over the world, Kngwarray is widely regarded as one of the great artists of the 20th century — and one of the most sought-after.
Her ascension to art world fame was rapid and unprecedented, not just for a First Nations or female artist, but for a septuagenarian. (Kngwarray was in her 70s when she started painting.)
She was also prolific.
The Anmatyerr elder is said to have produced more than 3,000 paintings during her working life as an artist, which spanned eight years. That's roughly one per day.
While all of this is true, the art world has long-positioned Kngwarray's work in the Western canon, and ascribed a non-Indigenous set of values that chases commercial success above all.
The latest retrospective of her work at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) seeks to remedy that.
Co-curated by Kelli Cole (Warumungu and Luritja peoples) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte and Kalkadoon peoples), the exhibition invites audiences to look at Kngwarray's work through a new lens, bringing Country, community and ancestral knowledge into focus.
"We're trying to turn the narrative around, to strip back a lot of that international-acclaim-mythologising of the artist and to really ground her work back in Country," says Perkins.
Through extensive consultation with community elders and Kngwarray's family, the curators have created an exhibition of 89 works that reveals the inextricable link between the beauty and spirit of Kngwarray's paintings and her Country, Alhalker.
"Kngwarray created thousands of works of art that drew from the vast cultural reservoir of knowledge that she channelled as an Anmatyerr matriarch of Alhalker," says Perkins.
"One of the things that really struck us is when the community said, 'These are true stories, she's telling the truth'. That's what the paintings are [doing] — they're telling the truth."
It's not abstraction, it's Alhalker
When you look at Kngwarray's oeuvre there's an array of styles at play, from vibrant dots and dynamic repeated stripes to compelling meandering lines and soft washes of colour.
For a long time, the art world attached labels like modernism and abstraction to describe her paintings and orientate them in Western tradition.
But they were missing something fundamental.
Kngwarray's style is rooted in ancient Aboriginal art practice — predating the modernists by tens of thousands of years — while the subject of her paintings was far more obvious. Over and over again she was painting her Alhalker Country: the landscape and its forms; its flora and fauna; its ancestral stories.
"What Kngwarray has said about why her work is famous is because she's painting her Country. And her Country is so beautiful and so significant and full of story.
"That's why people fight over her paintings," says Perkins.
Alhalker Country is in the Central Desert Sandover region of the Northern Territory, about 230 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. (Although most writings about Kngwarray will say she came from Utopia, which is the name adopted by white pastoralists who stumbled on the area in the 20s.)
By the time Kngwarray rose to global prominence, she was an elder in Alhalker, and a senior Anmatyerr law woman, who had custodianship of women's Dreaming sites and had been making art for and about Country for decades — from cultural sand drawings to ceremonial body painting.
Her deep connection to Country offered Kngwarray a wellspring of creativity and inspiration that she energetically translated to canvas.
"[Kngwarray's work] is very much about being able to see and express this intangible cultural world in some ways. Just the essence of it was something that certainly galvanised the art world," says Perkins.
"She had a way of articulating all the stories [about Country] in a visual language that is universal [and] in a way that most people can understand or be moved by or engage with."
Understanding the Awelye
Kngwarray's early work was defined by her training in batik. (More on this later.)
But in the mid-90s, her style shifted dramatically from the gestural, Expressionist-like splodges of colour in works such as The Alhalkere Suite (1993) — an epic 22-canvas installation depicting her Country fertilised by flood — to working with thick stripes of acrylic, stretching across paper and canvas.
What may at first seem like simple and repetitive forms are borne from ancient cultural knowledge. They're attributed to "awelye", which are the designs painted on Anmatyerr women's bodies for ceremony.
Kngwarray was painting awelye on women's bodies long before they were translated onto canvas. (She painted her first major acrylic work in 1988.)
When former NGV director James Mollison saw Knwarray's early awelye works, which were a series of simple black lines on paper, he remarked: "Just black lines on a white surface, but why are they so good?"
For Perkins, it's the gestural and tactile nature of her designs that makes them so captivating.
"The way the paint is applied in many ways reflects the gesture of body painting [and] that element of touch," she says.
"I think that efficiency or fluency, or immediacy of the gesture that is in her work has a lot to do with the cultural practices; the way you do things the way you've done things for your whole life."
The pencil yam
Also central to Kngwarray's work is her depiction of native flora and fauna.
She was especially fond of the anwerlarr — or pencil yam — a native vine with heart-shaped leaves and bean-like seed pods. The anwerlarr recurs throughout Kngwarray's work and is also her namesake (its seeds are called "kam").
Some of her works depict the seed pods scattered across the canvas, others show them in-flower.
In some of her monumental later works, such as Yam Awelye (1995), she paints the anwerlarr tubes in a sprawling tangle.
"If you're looking at the top of the surface, you've got these amazing entangled vines, but then you've got to think of what's underneath the surface, which is the yam or the pencil yam, which is this thin root.
"And then on top of that, you've got the Kam, which is her name, which is the seed that grows on that yam, so it all connects back to her," says Perkins.
Kngwarray's 1995 painting Anwerlarr anganenty (Big yam Dreaming) is among her most ambitious on canvas, spanning more than 8 metres in length and almost 3 metres in width. It was painted in the last year of Kngwarray's long and extraordinary life.
"Talking about what's on the surface and what's below the surface of Kngwarray's work, the anwerlarr [the pencil yam], is a good metaphor for that," reflects Perkins.
"There are things that you can see as you walk around the exhibition, but you've got to have that intimate knowledge of Country to understand what's happening 'underground'.
"Something that Kngwarray was so effective at doing was creatively channelling that story and that knowledge into a form that could be seen by audiences and, if not interpreted accurately, appreciated."
Don't breeze by the Batiks
While Kngwarray is famous for her expansive canvases, few people know that she cut her teeth with batik.
Batik is a cloth dyeing technique that originated in Java, Indonesia, around the 6th or 7th century (its use predates written records). Often relegated to "craft", batik involves applying hot wax to fabric using a pipe-like tool, which is then boiled to remove the wax and leave the design imprinted.
Kngwarray worked in this format for 11 years before she began painting on canvas.
How Kngwarray came to learn batik has complicated ties to colonisation and the expansion of pastoral leases in and around Alhalker during her lifetime.
Perkins explains: "She witnessed great change in her life as the pastoral frontier moved through her Country, so she saw white fellas for the first time as a young girl."
As an adult, Kngwarray worked on different pastoral stations and in homesteads, before undertaking a short educational course for adults in the 70s. Fortuitously, it included creative practices such as tie-dyeing and batik, and led to the establishment of the renowned Utopia Women's Batik Group, of which Kngwarray was a founding member.
"The rest is history, of course", says Perkins.
Kngwarray approached batik with characteristic gusto, describing herself as "the boss for batik".
Using the pipe-like batik tools, she made free, meandering lines on fabric, inspired by her environment. Kngwarray rarely left Alhalker during her lifetime, so there was very little external media or influence to look to.
The batiks are crucial to understanding Kngwarray's artistic evolution, says Perkins.
"When you come into the exhibition, you see in the early works, and particularly in the batiks, a lot of the elements of [Kngwarray's] work that she creates later in her life. You can see awelye, the body painting, the emus, [the] goanna [and] all of the different flora and fauna of her Country.
"As was pointed out to us by her community, there are subtle references. Different colors mean different things, [for example] they can relate to age, so some of the paintings are about an emu, [but] they're saying, 'this is about an old emu because there's white and grey [and] that means she's talking about an older emu'.
"So I would say that batiks, generally, are a really good starting point for people to really look at them closely, and the more you look at them, the more you see."
While Kngwarray is undeniably one of Australia's leading painters of modern times, this retrospective gently reminds us that she wasn't an overnight sensation by accident — her artistic excellence stems from a lifetime spent creating art in community and drawing inspiration from Country.
"She was a formidable personality but very, very embedded in the community, not some art star lone wolf that went and charted their own course," says Perkins.
"Being part of that community, from what I understand, is what gave her that strength and that resoluteness and determination."
For co-curators Perkins and Cole, the exhibition is an invitation to understand Kngwarray's work and connect deeply.
"Her works are visually beautiful, but there's real purpose and meaning in them. It's really important to look at the work and listen, to hear what the work's telling you," says Perkins.
"If you really listen to the work, the stories and the truth-telling becomes clear to you."
Emily Kam Kngwarray is at the National Gallery of Australia until April 28.