Latest news with #EmilyKngwarray
SBS Australia
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
History made as first major Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition opens in Europe
Emily Kam Kngwarray was once asked why people loved her paintings. "I paint my Country and people love my Country," she responded. The senior Anmatyerr woman from Alhalker Country started painting in her seventies, seven years before her death in 1996. Her work depicts her life and her deep knowledge of culture and Country. She is one of the twentieth century's most remarkable artists. Her pieces are cherished across the world and some now hang in a new exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Five years in the making, the expansive show is a collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia and the first major solo exhibition for an Indigenous Australian artist at the Tate. Co-curator of the exhibition and the Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art at the Tate Modern Kimberley Moulton told NITV displaying Kngwarray's works in the United Kingdom will introduce new audiences to Indigenous art. The Yorta Yorta woman hopes the show will invite people to learn more about our cultures. Source: Supplied / Kathleen Arundell 'For the first time, we're going to have Tate audiences that are thinking about what Country means to Aboriginal people, not just land, but Country,' she said. 'What we embody in that, in terms of the plants and the land, but also the spiritual aspects of Country, the cultural aspects of Country.' Ms Moulton said sharing culture through art was an important aspect of Kngwarray's practice and this latest showing sees her evolution as an artist. 'I think with the exhibition it's really important to acknowledge that she was very intentional in her work,' she said. 'There was an intent to share her culture with the world, to share these deep layers of Country and knowledge that she had and quite a brilliant approach to colour as well.' Warumungu and Luritja woman and lead curator, Kelli Cole, has worked on previous iterations of the exhibition in collaboration with Hettie Perkins. She brings with her a strong connection with Kngwarray's work and with her community and Country. Having travelled to Kngwarray's community upwards of twelve times over the years, she said working with them was central to the curatorial process. 'Every painting, every wall text, every video, everything we've ever made for this exhibition, her family see it and approve it before we ever display it and that is really, really important,' said Ms Cole. Renowned artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Credit: NITV The exhibition includes 83 pieces, some of which have never been seen before and have come out of private collections from across Europe and America. Ms Cole said that Kngwarray's global reach and impact is down to her ability to move people of all backgrounds. 'We're in this room that is all about Country and I've got goosebumps talking about it," she said. "There's a visceral feeling about her work and I think that is because knowing that her work is all about painting those ceremonies…the Country that she does ceremony for, so she vitalises that Country, Country is vitalised and it gives back to her." She said Country strikes her in the art. 'As an Aboriginal woman, I feel it, but when I'm with my non-Indigenous colleagues and friends and visitors that have seen this exhibition at the National Gallery or even stand in front of her work regardless of where they are, they always say that they feel something," she said. "I think that is extraordinary.' Lead curator Kelli Cole (left) and Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art at the Tate Modern, Kimberley Moulton. Credit: NITV Ms Moulton said Kngwarray's practice of drawing solely on her knowledge of and connection to Country, is what makes her a remarkable artist. 'She wasn't looking towards Europe or America in her work, she was very much informed by Country, she was reading and interpreting her land,' Ms Moulton said. 'She started painting in her late seventies, so [there were] decades of this deep connection and I think it's really interesting to see the art world be so responsive to her work in that way because I think what they're responding to is this incredible detail to being true to the cultural ways of being, of her lens, the way she looked at Country and then applied that to the canvas is so unique.' It wasn't a refusal of the Western canon - it just wasn't important. She didn't need it because she had Country and she had culture, and that influenced everything that she was doing, and that was her story that she was telling. Kimberley Moulton, Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art at the Tate Modern. Kngwarray also regularly painted her namesake, kam, the seedpods of the anwerlarr (pencil yam), an important Dreaming for Kngwarray's Country, Alhalker, showing just how intertwined her identity and Country was. "I paint my plant, the one I am named after," she once said. "Kam is its name. Kam. I am named after the anwelarr plant. I am Kam!" Kngwarray's ability to portray Country truthfully is undeniable and perhaps best summed up by those who knew her best. On one wall of the exhibition a quote from Jedda Purvis Kngwarray, Jennifer Purvis Kngwarray and Josie Kunoth Petyarr is printed. 'If you close your eyes and imagine the paintings in your mind's eye, you will see them transform. They are real - what Kngwarray painted is alive and true. The paintings are dynamic and keep on changing, and you can see how realistic they are," it reads. "You might wonder, 'Hey, how come these paintings are changing form?' That powerful Country changes colour, just like the paintings do. The Country transforms itself, and those paintings do as well. That's why the old woman is famous.' Emily Kam Kngwarray is at Tate Modern from 10 July 2025 until 11 January 2026.
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Emily Kam Kngwarray review – connected to something far beyond the art world
Painting quickly and directly, with few revisions and no changes of heart, Emily Kam Kngwarray's art is filled with exhilarations and with difficulties. Part of the pleasure of her art is that it is so immediate, so visually accessible, with its teeming fields and clusters of finger-painted dots, its sinuous and looping paths, its intersections and branchings, its staves and repetitive rhythms. You can get lost in there, and sometimes overwhelmed. You can feel the connection between her hand and eye, and the bodily gestures she makes as she paints. Kngwarray's paintings might well remind you of a kind of gestural abstraction they have nothing to do with, and which the artist would never in any case have seen. The things we look at in Kngwarray's art are about an entirely different order of experience to the similar kinds of brushstrokes driven this way and that around other, more familiar canvases we might also find in Tate Modern, where her retrospective has arrived from the National Gallery of Australia. But this similarity is also one of the reasons Kngwarray became famous in the first place. Kngwarray only painted for the last six or seven years of her life, leading up to her death in 1996. She made upwards of 3,000 paintings. Before that she spent a little over a decade making batik prints, which were no less inventive than her paintings; foliage and flowers cover the cotton and later silk, lizards and emus erupt from the fabrics which swarm with life and her own lively and confident graphic touch. Her art always had a spirit of improvisation and immersion in the process, first in the complexities of printmaking and then in painting with thin, quick-drying acrylics. Born around 1914 in Australia's Northern Territory, Kngwarray spent her entire life around her ancestral Alhalker Country homeland. Colonisers had first appeared there in the 1870s, and confrontations had led to many Aboriginal deaths. As a child, Kngwarray learned to run away from the whitefellers. First came the surveyors, then the telegraph, and then police, trackers and settlers, digging boreholes for water for their sheep, goats, horses and cattle, and appropriating sacred ancestral lands. Missionaries came with camels, magic lantern shows and a gramophone. In the early 1930s, 100 or more Aboriginal people in the area were shot or poisoned by police and a colonist leaseholder (who had been involved in previous atrocities), in retribution for spearing cattle. Kngwarray spent much of her adult life on stations, watching cattle and sheep, working in kitchens and minding children. She spoke little English, and like other Aboriginal people, generally worked for rations rather than payment. The sheep and cattle stations couldn't function without their labour. She was an accomplished hunter-gatherer. Photographs in the fascinating catalogue show Kngwarray skinning echidnas and bearing a lizard by the tail. By the 1970s, land began to be returned to its traditional owners, and adult literacy and numeracy courses were set up, leading, circuitously, to a batik printing course at the former Utopia station homestead, as a possible avenue to self-employment for women in the area. Then in her mid-60s, Kngwarray became, as she said later, 'the boss of batik'. By the early 1980s, batiks by the Utopia artists began to be recognised and exhibited, firstly in Australia then further afield. By the end of the 1980s, an Aboriginal controlled organisation took over the Women's Batik Group, and began distributing paints and canvas as an alternative to the highly labour-intensive batik. The imagery, motifs, iconography, and even spatial sense of Kngwarray's work comes directly from her Indigenous Anmatyerr culture; women's songs and ceremonies involving communal body painting – using natural pigments mixed with fat to stripe breasts, torsos and arms, ceremonies involving scarification, and telling stories with the sand at one's feet, using leaves and twigs and other ephemera to represent characters, situations, weather. All this storytelling and bodypainting takes place while sitting on the ground, which is also where Kngwarray put herself to paint. For larger works she would sit on the unstretched canvas and work from within it. Painting for her was a continuation of her cultural practice – although it appears she was hesitant about revealing the stories her paintings told. This isn't unusual for any artist. Its good to have secrets and mysteries and things unexplained. Where her paintings are titled, they might be called 'Everything, or My Country, or be named after a specific place or a type of yam, an old man emu with babies, or appear to describe a journey through the bush. Arrow shapes turn out to be the footprints of emus in the sand as they make their way from here to there, pausing to eat fruits or grain or insects in their path. Tangles of line depict the vine of the pencil yam, whose presence betrays the tubers underground and the seed-pods from which the artist got her name Kam. 'I am Kam! I paint my plant, the one I am named after,' she once explained. 'They are found growing up along the creek banks. That's what I painted. I keep on painting the place that belongs to me – I never change from painting that place.' Sometimes the paintings are meticulous in their ordering, and at other times a line will scrabble all over the place, rolling and slewing around the large canvas. There are blizzards of dots, translucent white lines crossing and recrossing the territory of the canvas, and emphatic black lines crazing a white surface with marks that nearly cohere – but into what? Often, I'm left teetering. One long suite of 22 identically sized canvases, all dotted and clotted and clogged with colour, seems to evoke a consistent though shifting optical terrain, while banks of horizontal and vertical lines evoke the body markings of a traditional ceremony, and the sense of bodies in motion. The closer I get to Kngwarray's art, the more it recedes. On a physical and optical level, it feels accessible, in ways that are a bit overfamiliar. But that wasn't what the artist was doing. Her art was about life and connectedness to something more than just the art world and its manners. Emily Kam Kngarraway is at Tate Modern until 11 January
