08-07-2025
Is the truth about this ‘Outback genius' more complex than the Tate makes out?
According to Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate, this retrospective for the Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray is 'the most important exhibition Tate has done for a long time'. After a disappointingly samey start, it delivers on the hype, with a thrilling finale.
Perhaps Balshaw was galvanised by a research trip to, as she puts it, 'the red desert lands of Alhalker', in Australia's Northern Territory, where Kngwarray – who, according to the curators, extended 'a continuing cultural tradition much more ancient than any to have sprung from European soil' – was born in 1914. Certainly, the show exemplifies a recent turn towards indigenous art; this, rather than, say, yet another exhibition devoted to Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso, is what gets Tate's curators going these days.
Given the 'bush' (or personal) name Kam, after the Aboriginal word for the seeds and seedpods of the 'pencil yam' (which later inspired a motif commonly found in her canvases), Kngwarray – whose early years predated the 'whitefeller' domination of Central Australia – only took up painting in 1988, towards the end of her life, having spent 11 years working in batik while participating in art-and-craft workshops. After a couple of introductory rooms, the exhibition gives the impression that, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, she emerged as an artist fully formed.
Twenty-five surprisingly homogenous early paintings appear in a vast, open gallery, along with eight batiks (some of which seem to seethe with insect-like life). These acrylic pictures are mostly abstracted fields of dots, like blooms of lichen, or microbes multiplying on a microscope slide, but representing native seeds. Sometimes accompanied by interconnecting lines, they are superimposed on dun, reddish backgrounds redolent of the brick-coloured soil of Kngwarray's homeland.
Occasionally, schematic motifs, also associated with Alhalker Country, are perceptible: the distinctive shapes of local flora, an emu's three-toed footprints, the child-like silhouettes of geckos or blue-tongued lizards; often, there's a sense of something stirring and fluttering in scrubby undergrowth. In effect, they're not unlike those colour-blindness tests in which numbers are hidden among dots of contrasting hues.
