Emily Kam Kngwarray became, in the final decade of her life, the most celebrated and sought after Australian artist of her time. A senior Anmatyerr woman from the Northern Territory of Australia, Kngwarray translated her ceremonial and spiritual engagement with her ancestral Country, Alhalker, into textiles and acrylic paintings on canvas. Only taking up painting in her 70s, Kngwarray forged a path for Aboriginal artists, women artists and Australian artists, and continues to entice audiences around the world three decades after her passing. Her practice was shaped by her knowledge of her Country and by her role in women’s ceremonial traditions of ‘awely’, which encompass song, dance and the painting of bodies with ground ochres. She sat on the ground when she painted, much in the same way she would sit to prepare food, dig yams from the earth, tell stories by drawing on the sand or ‘paint up’ for awely ceremonies. Even though her approach to painting was developed in isolation from the European and North American practices of her time, there is a strong resemblance to the work of the French Impressionists and American Abstract Expressionists, whose work she never encountered.
EMILY KAM KNGWARRAY (1910 - 1996)
synthetic polymer paint
Acquired in 2024
