ICONIC STYLE: EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE

The late, great Anmatyerre elder is one of the eminent artists ever to practice in the history of Australian art and her presence on the international stage is only increasing in power.

The late, great Anmatyerre elder is one of the eminent artists ever to practice in the history of Australian art

Towards the end of 1988 at Utopia, an Aboriginal Australian homeland north-east of Alice Springs, a women’s group specialising in batik was offered acrylic paint and linen on which to work for the first time. The brainchild of Rodney Gooch, manager of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) shop, and Sydney gallerist Christopher Hodges, A Summer Project exhibition was devised so the women — all experienced image-makers — could continue their artistic practice across the peak of the hot desert summer. The collection of canvases, a month or so later, proved to be a watershed moment in the history of Australian art. There were many beautiful works, according to Hodges, but those of one particular elder woman, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, were truly exceptional. In a career brief but extraordinary, Kngwarreye produced more than 3000 works in just eight years, prior to her death in 1996, including the monumental Earth’s Creation, which set a world record for Aboriginal art, as well as for a work by a female Australian artist, when it sold for $1,056,000 in 2007. (The work went under the hammer for a second time a decade later at Cooee Art Gallery, selling for $2.1 million.) Truly inspiring, though, was the creative about-face itself: Kngwarreye put a paintbrush to canvas for the first time at age 79 and became one of Australia’s greatest artists. “She obviously enjoyed painting,” says Hodges, whose gallery Utopia Art Sydney represented Kngwarreye throughout her career. “You can see it in all the best works. There’s a vigour and enthusiasm and an emphatic strength in her mark making. She was an amazing woman: if you knew her she just had it, a knowing, and understanding.”

Kngwarreye shared a profound interconnectedness with her people, the Anmatyerre, and their ancestral homeland in the Central Australian Desert — a bond fundamental in any survey of her work. “Oneness with Country is central to the identity of the Anmatyerre and is expressed in their visual culture,” says Judith Ryan AM, senior curator of Indigenous Art at the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria). Born circa 1910, Kngwarreye’s life was turned irrevocably upside down when the borders of the Utopia pastoral lease were drawn across the lands of the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre peoples in 1926. “Like other dispossessed people of the region, Emily moved to Utopia Station and was forced to work tirelessly for the new occupiers of her Country in exchange for rations,” says Ryan. In a harbinger of the trailblazer she would become in later life, the young Kngwarreye spent her days as a camel driver and stock-hand. The physical strength she developed in her hands and arms would serve her well in her gestural painting style decades later. When the Aboriginal Land Rights Act was passed in the Northern Territory in 1976 — and the Utopia pastoral lease acquired by the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission the same year — it was in 1977, that Kngwarreye was introduced to batik during classes at Utopia Station. In both batik and painting, according to Ryan, the structural elements of her work — the bold stripes forming the primary source of her iconography — find their origins in the body painting of women’s rituals, known as awely. Also depicted are designs that signify her main Dreaming, the atnwelarr, or pencil yam, abundant in her grandfather’s Country, Alhalker. Kam – another way to spell Kame – in fact, is Kngwarreye’s Aboriginal or bush name, and means ‘seed of the pencil yam’. ››