A Western narrative is invariably grafted onto Australia’s most prominent Indigenous visual artists – a reductive paradigm that makes them easier to understand, interpret and write about. And as a practitioner at the vanguard of the central desert art movement of the 1970s and 1980s, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray (a white male given name, attributed to her in her teens) is perhaps the greatest example.
The simple version goes something like this. Kngwarray did not learn to draw her name (“Emillly”) until the late 1970s, around the same time she began expressing herself through visual art, after being introduced to the media of batik and tie-dye. Then, in the 1980s, she moved to the more commercial (at least for dealers) and aesthetically valued medium of acrylic on canvas – and her fame and marketability went stratospheric.
Her signature images of her homeland in the Australian desert inspired awe from the global art world: gallerists, curators and, above all, art dealers. (In 2017, a Kngwarray painting, Earth’s Creation I, sold for $2.1 million, breaking the record for the highest auction price for an Australian female artist.) These paintings were intrinsically inspired by and fully reflected ecology and culture of her ancestral Land, Alhalker, which lies within the borders of the Sandover region of the central desert, commonly called Utopia. And yet, thanks to her prodigious production (many batiks and an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 paintings) – and today a more lucrative than ever global market – her work is too often interpreted in the context of Western abstraction and modernism.
But Kngwarray, who died in 1996 at the age of 82, is much more mysterious. She worked literally and figuratively in isolation from the Western artists of her time and yet remains as collectible as some of the biggest names.
Emily Kam Kngwarray, a stunning retrospective opening this week at the National Gallery of Australia (and traveling to London’s Tate Modern in July 2025), brings overdue perspective – and perhaps posthumous agency and dignity – to the artist and her phenomenal oeuvre.
The many batiks and canvases in the exhibition span the last twenty years of her life: two decades revealed through the exhibition’s essential documentary and catalog as part of a much longer, more complex creative and cultural story.
As part of Anmatyerr’s timeless human continuity, Kngwarray – together with the women of her community – reflected the culture, history and ecology of Alhalker through sand stories (finger marks in the sand, or type) and “painting” (ochres mixed with emu fat) on breasts, chest and upper arms during women’s songs and ceremonies, or awesome.
Kngwarray’s acrylic on canvas, her batiks and tie-dyes, the symbolic painting of skin and marks in the red earth, were all part of the continuum of her cultural and artistic expression.
Contextualizing Kngwarray outside the Western art market and its curatorial traditions is ambitious and challenging. But for years, First Nations curators Kelli Cole (of Warumungu/Luritja heritage) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte/Kalkadoon) met and listened to women in and around Kngwarray’s Country; women related to, known and created with her. It is instructive that Cole and Perkins grew up in central Australia; Cole met Kngwarray and the other female artists in her area through family connections. Linguist Jennifer Green was also involved in this consultation process; she first met Kngwarray in 1976, when she was setting up literacy courses in Utopia, which would pave the way for a young arts and crafts movement that would eventually flourish.
And so this exhibition brings us Kngwarray firmly through the prism of her world – human, cultural, ecological, deeply historical, geographical – as matriarch, sister, friend, storyteller, visual artist and ever celebrant of Country.
Nationally and internationally she is “Emily”. But in desert land she is Kam (comb is the buried seed pod of the Anweerlarr, or pencil yam) and Kngwarray (her skin name). The yam – its intricate, criss-crossing tubers underground, above ground its intertwining vines and yellow flowers – and the local emu, Anchorrcelebrated by Anmatyerr, are consistently repetitive motifs in her works.
Kngwarray worked quickly, especially in her final years, when her output was at its most prolific and almost urgent, using quick, thick, confident brushstrokes that earned her such a culturally incoherent comparison with Western contemporaries. The batiks, translucent and dream-like, are distinguished by an extraordinary, delicate beauty.
Some of her canvases, such as Alhalker – Old Man Emu with Babies (owned by actor Steve Martin, an avowed Kngwarray enthusiast), are finely detailed and fascinating. But it is the enormous, mural-like, internationally known blockbusters Yam Awely and Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), painted consecutively over two days and one day in 1995, that leap from the white walls of the NGA and breathe.
They certainly explain why contemporary collectors and dealers – who benefited so much from Kngwarray’s paintings – were so captivated by her.
In their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Cole, Green and Perkins write: “The history of Western art was disrupted by its encounter with an enduring cultural tradition far older than any tradition to have emerged from European soil. Some who have written about Kngwarray’s work have struggled to reconcile the origins of her artworks within the context of their ultimate destination in the art market.”
Cole says that “consultation” with debt collection agencies can too often be weighed against Indigenous people. As curators, she says, they listened much more than they talked.
In early 2023, Cole, Perkins and Green camped in Alhalker with a group of female descendants of Kngwarray, some of whom traveled to Canberra for the opening of the NGA exhibition. The exhibition and catalog talk extensively about the descendants’ memories of Kngwarray (they respectfully call her “the old lady”) and the cultural importance of her work.
During that trip, Green played back recordings she had made of Kngwarray talking and singing.
“They listened to it a few times and then they all started singing along with her,” says Cole. “Even though she’s gone, and she’s been gone for a long time, she’s still alive in spirit and still teaching those women those songs again. It was a very emotional experience and something very beautiful for us.
“Not many people understand this, but Kngwarray has painted her land… but that land belongs to those descendants – those people who live in Utopia. So when people ask questions about Alhalker’s painting, you have to remember that it is a place of residence and they have all these cultural obligations.” awesome ceremonies that Kngwarray so extensively refers to still take place.
Although Kngwarray’s creative life was one of continued cultural expression, she was also ultimately practical about the medium she chose for her final and most famous works.
In her words: “I didn’t want to continue with the hard batik work required: boiling the fabric over and over again, lighting a fire and using up all the soap powder over and over again. That’s why I gave up batik and switched to canvas – it was easier.”
Kngwarray’s life was as extraordinary as her art, as it spanned her first contact with a white man (“a devil”), the dehumanizing impact of pastoralism on Country, the devastating lasting legacy of colonialism on her people – and her interface with a global art market remains insatiable for her work.
Ironically, ‘Emily’ Kam Kngwarray – the exhibition that interprets her as she should be – might have its biggest audience in London, home of the empire that so threatened her country.
Maria Belshaw, director of Tate museums and galleries, said she visited the community where Kngwarray lived and worked to talk to her descendants about the possibility of the exhibition going to Britain. She says the women initially had a lot of questions, but then “supported the work of the old lady who came to London… they were then very keen to share her story more widely”.
Belshaw hopes “very much” that the women will come to London to see the exhibition. “We’re going to have to help them travel,” she says. “We would love for them to be there to see how Kngwarray’s work is welcomed across London, just as it has been here in Canberra.”