Indigenous Art of the Dreamtime

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Emily Kame Kngwarreye has been the greatest single sensation to emerge from the entire ‘school’ of desert art. Her dominance of this art scene was contained within the decade of the 90’s. She died at Alice Springs in 1996.

As is the case with most Aboriginal painters her works are a response to the land of her birth, Alhalkere, northeast of Alice Springs. She paints the spiritual forces that imbue the country with contours of the landscape, cycles of seasons, the flow of flooding waters and the patterns of seeds and the shape of plants. Emily’s major dreaming was the yam. Her name ‘Kame’ means ‘yam flower’.

6. My Country 1996, 127 x 88cm

Born cl910 at Soakage Bore, Utopia Station, Emily was an Eastern Anmatyerre speaker. Her ‘art’ career began in 1977 when the women of the Utopia area were taught to design and dye batik prints on silks provided by white art advisers. These proved to be both popular and productive and gave the community women an opportunity to earn some money and to come together in a meaningful way on a regular basis. Emily’s batiks were much sought after and when the group began painting with acrylic paint on canvas in 1988-89 her success continued in that medium. Her first canvas, ‘Emu Woman’ 1988-89, was reproduced on the cover of ‘The Summer Project’ catalogue for the exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in 1989.

Her fresh and dynamic approach to painting meant that demand was high for her work and in the years prior to her death in September 1996, Emily became the greatest phenomenon ever in the history of Australian art. Here was an 80 years old lady from deep in the Australian outback re-writing the art record books. In the process she created a stream of new styles (10 in 8 years) each of which appealed to her growing band of admirers. Dealers clamoured for her work and in 1992 the Federal Government awarded her a healthy financial scholarship so that she would continue to paint.

When asked what her paintings were about Emily would usually reply, “Everything, the whole lot”. By this she meant that the works encompassed notions about body painting, yam dreaming, emu dreaming and her country. They were after all, inseparable. When asked how long had she been painting she would reply, ‘all my life’. And by this she meant that for as long as she could remember she had participated in body painting rituals with the women of her extended family.

Discussing Emily’s paintings and career the Australian National
Gallery Curator Wally Caruana has written,

The paintings are not the daubings of an ‘untutored’ artist acting purely on intuition; the term has been applied often in the press to hype up the phenomenon which is Kngwarreye. Intuitive no doubt these works are; but it is an intuition founded on decades of making art for private purposes, of drawing in the soft earth, of painting on people’s bodies in ritual or, in the late l970s, of painting on the bodies of the Utopia women as they successfully presented their claims to their land in legal proceedings.

One may deduce that Emily’s work was indeed about, ‘the whole lot’. Her works are now represented in major public and private collections throughout Australia and in many such collections throughout the world.

Emily painting, Aboriginal Desert Art Gallery, Alice Springs

7. My Country 1994, 174 x 115cm

8. My Country 1994, 180 x 105cm