About
One of the most important Aboriginal painters of the twentieth century, Emily Kam Kngwarrey (b. 1910 – 1996) began painting in earnest in her early seventies. Emily Kam Kngwarrey’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 Kngwarrey’s works on canvas sparkle with the broad mytho-poetry 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 Kngwarrey’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.
Emily Kam Kngwarrey is unique among Indigenous Australian painters for her prolific and innovative style, matched with a revered and distinctive colour sense. Working on intimate and monumental scales alike, the artist employed brushes, sticks, and fingertips on un-stretched linen laid flat on the ground, sitting beside or within the composition itself. Emily Kam Kngwarrey 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.
