Emily Kngwarreye c1910-2 September 1996

Rodney Gooch had been asked to take over the Utopia Women’s Batik Group early in 1987, and managed to convert what had been a community effort into one of the busiest painting cooperatives in the country. What’s really fascinating is that, in 1989, all the words written during the launch of Utopia’s first painting exhibition emphasised that it was “reflecting Aboriginal community philosophy and practice whereby everything is shared”, in the words of curator Anne Brady. But Brady’s instinct for genius totally undercut this, then current non-Indigenous understanding of the Aboriginal art world, by featuring Emily’s first painting on the catalogue cover.

And when you look through that SH Ervin Gallery catalogue of Utopia Women’s Painting – A Summer Project 1988-89, it’s quite apparent that while Emily had seized on the arrival of canvas and acrylic paint to move on from the batik work on silk that she’d been doing for a decade, most of the other 80 artists involved simply translated their waxed flowers, birds and landscape patterns from silk to canvas.

Was this because Emily was an elder in her 70s with the specific responsibility to promote her Anmatyerre alwelye culture whenever she could? Or was she just instinctively a great artist???

Certainly, I am not alone in accepting the latter as a truth, even if the former reason may also have been a factor. For what was probably Emily’s most significant international exposure was at Osaka in Japan in 2008 where Prof Akira Tatehata, the gallery’s director, fell in love with “Emily’s dauntless confidence which allowed her to see a blank canvas as vast as the 8 metre long ‘Big Yam Dreaming’ of 1996 complete in her 80 year old mind’s eye. And she managed to transcend any stylistic restraints, and produce works of complete originality and uninhibited beauty”.

Tatehata also invented the tag for Emily, ‘The Impossible Modernist’, which, of course, challenges any tendency to keep First Nations art in a national basket of Australia’s own. But then he went further, moving from the West to Eastern art theory to declare that the painting he’d chosen for the cover of the Osaka catalogue, Emily’s last work – a wash of broad brush greys – is “a pure minimal abstraction that gives me a Zen Buddhist sense of Nirvana”.

Somehow the Japanese found emotion in work we’re too blinkered to see, probably because of Australia’s guilt-laden Indigenous politics.

For I have to say that being a Pom with no ancestry in Australia has almost certainly allowed me to have a more unencumbered embrace of First Nations culture than those of my age who, in their youth, simply never saw or thought about Aborigines. Earlier, there were generations involved in the racial subordination of Aborigines as colonialism spread inexorably out from the Continent‘s edges, or there were those who simply had an expectation that they would die out in the face of a superior civilisation.

What, I wonder, was in my perception when faced by the 1992 dotted painting by Emily in Sydney’s Hogarth Gallery? I knew that the painting spoke to me despite a price well over anything I’d paid before, and I intuited that the sense of movement sweeping across its surface was what impressed initially. How famous was the lady at the time? A smart Michael Boulter had already brought out ‘The Art of Utopia’ maintaining the community theory based upon the Summer Project show. But in 1992, Paul Keating’s Creative Fellowships had picked Emily out for national mention, which, briefly, she thought meant she had to retire from painting. But that was in October, a month after my purchase. And it would be 1995 before a newspaper like the Sydney Morning Herald would hail “The late flowering of a desert genius”, leading up to her selection (and posthumous showing), with two other Aboriginal women artists, at the 1996 Venice Biennale.

Much of that SMH article would try to deal with issues of provenance – for, by then, many a dealer knew that there was money to be made out there up the Sandover Highway from Alice Springs. Rodney Gooch and his now-established relationship with Chris Hodges’ Utopia Art Sydney gallery couldn’t hold on to his early monopoly. Especially as the neighbouring cattle station to Utopia – Delmore Downs – had art-savvy owners in Don and Janet Holt, offering greater security than Emily’s community could hope to provide in the red dust of Soakage Bore where she lived. The Hogarth Gallery was supplied by Delmore, which offered me a colourful certificate for my painting simply called ‘Desert Landscape’.

That was almost certainly not Emily’s title. For she was famous for pushing away a completed canvas and declaring “That’s pretty. Bye Bye”. And when pressed to explain its content, would simply say “Whole lot. That’s what I paint, whole lot”.

But it’s amazing how inventive some sellers have got since she died on September 2nd in 1996 with a work now called ‘Earth’s Creation’ becoming her biggest priced work so far at $2m. Would it have sold so well as ‘Untitled’? How about ’State of my Country’? And it seems I could give mine a seasonal title as its certificate assures me it “reflects the transition from dry, unproductive winter to the fertility of summer rains. A lush green background with bursts of gold representing clumps of dry spinifex, winter’s remnants, blowing across the canvas”.

All good. However it took Chris Hodges to allow me to realise that one of Emily’s instinctive painterly skills at this stage in her career was dotting on dotting: two or three colours on top of each other, never completely obscuring the first. They create surprising depth.

And colour selection is also a key. What an instinct Emily had from early in her career – moving on from the almost-ochre range of her first Emu Woman, she rarely failed to delight the eye as she cycled through golden yellows, deep purples, even reds that still reflected her vision of country. Recently, I queried a bright yellow patch in a later Yam painting and discovered that the Yam root after which she was named Kame, changes colour as it develops, and yellow was the tint of its ‘teenage’ years.

In 1993, Emily broke free from dotting on one of the many radical shifts she managed during her brief seven year career, and grabbed bigger brushes and wilder colours in an eighteen month foray admired by Emily’s prime curator, Margo Neale as Colourism. Neale was involved in Emily’s first solo show that toured Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne galleries in 1998 and 99, then the Japanese tour. But I’m afraid I don’t admire much of the resulting Colourist paintings, suspecting that the desert blight had entered her eyes and the brightness of pink in particular was all she could easily see. Nothing like the faint traces of blue in my Emily, hinting at the seasonality of the native acacia flower. Weirdly, Neale justifies her identification of Colourism by saying, “The visual intensity of these paintings does not come from the science of optics one associates with early 20th Century colourists such as the Delaunays or indeed Monet”.

Indeed, the comparison hadn’t crossed my mind!

Thanks heavens she moved on to body lines, initially in black and white. Such radical changes of style were invariably a reflection of her move to a different subject-matter that she needed to communicate – or as Neale put it, “Starting a new verse in a song cycle, finding brush-stroke energy in the rhythms of ceremonial dance. This was the result of an accumulation of experiences related to her age, her exposure to the art market, and her personal development”.

But you can’t keep a great colourist down – Emily was soon experimenting with the colours that made her dotted era so varied and satisfying. And I don’t think she ever used pink again as she branched out into tangles of yam roots, wild, wind-blown masses of grasses, and the final 24-canvas ethereal series of gestural strokes achieved by a woman now losing physical strength but still determined to move us, using a broad gesso brush on small canvases.

Rodney Gooch was still there as a private dealer and occasional adviser to the end – appearing memorably in my film, Art from the Heart? in 1998, then, sadly dying in 2002. But at the end, Emily put herself mainly in the hands of family, especially her dealer great-nephew Fred Torres. But it’s to Gooch that I turn for a greater understanding of the woman I never had the chance to meet – though, amazingly, I’ve discovered that she came to Sydney in 1988 for a Survival Day Aboriginal march. Who’d have thought she had time or inclination for national politics?

In an interview related to Gooch handing over his Utopia collection jointly to the Riddoch and Flinders Uni galleries, he’s quoted as explaining:
“She had an approach that no other artist had. All she ever wanted to develop was something that was pretty, that blended together and had to look appealing. She often looked at works and lifted her head and she’d go over it in a light, bright colour to give it that final lift. I used to say to her, put on some white if you’re worried, and she did for a long time. In a funny way, Emily used to listen to what I used to say – one of the few! She wanted to get it right because she was in a position where she wanted to develop. But she never owned anything, her lifestyle was giving. She wanted to give, to produce and develop and cultivate”.

And to help us all read Kngwarreye’s art – and Aboriginal Desert art generally – more clearly, what may delight the Western eye as colourful abstraction, with perhaps a touch of spirituality, has its roots firmly in the practicalities of desert life that Aborigines formalised over the millennia into their matching ceremonial life.

Somewhere, Emily laid it all out:
“Whole lot, that’s the whole lot. Awelye (my Dreamings), Alatyeye (pencil yam), Arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a Dreamtime pup/dingo), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (a favourite food of emus, a small plant), Atnwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint; the whole lot”.

“The art critic Walter Benjamin is quoted as saying, “Either the paintings are traditional and not modern, or modern and not traditional’. And yet Emily is somehow utterly and completely both, which is why she has been described as the “impossible modernist (by Prof Tatehata). For she managed to transcend any stylistic restraints, and produce works of complete originality and uninhibited beauty”.

PS: You may have noticed recent variants on Emily’s name spelling appearing since the National Gallery of Australia gave her a belated solo show in 2024, moving (partially) to the Tate Modern in London in 2025. For strange reasons, they chose to call her Emily Kam Kngwarray. Having been around a while myself, I’m aware that the great lady has been variously called Emily Ngwarai, Ngwarreye and now Kngwarray. There’s no doubt that Anmatyerre (pronounced Anmatjera) is a hard language to transliterate into English. But I do object to non-Indigenous orthographers playing with her name. Consistency is surely essential for history and the world’s indices. And my faith in Emily Kame Kngwarreye lies with assurances from Chris Hodges, who met her many times, that the lady herself had studied and approved that spelling of her name in English.

For heavens sake – Kame is pronounced with its final ‘e’. Why would you drop it in English???

Sadly, under the NGA’s inappropriate name, the Gallery is touring an exhibition of Emily’s works nationally next year. Beginning at Araluen Arts Centre in Mparntwe/Alice Springs on 9 April 2027, the exhibition will return the Anmatyerre artist’s work to the Central Desert, close to her home Country in Urapuntja/Utopia, before travelling to Cairns Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Newcastle Art Gallery and Burnie Arts Centre.

However, academic and prolific author on the Indigenous, Christine Nicholls is also clear that “the primary concern should be to respect the wishes of the artists where we have been privy to such information. So we have used the long-established and widely used forms Emily Kame Kngwarreye” in the catalogue for Gooch’s Utopia (2008).

PPS. This article is based on a chapter from a book in progress devoted to my Aboriginal art collection.

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