28. EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE 

The genesis of Emily Kame Kngwarreyes painting lies in a range of experiences and custodial obligations she shared with other women in caring for Country and presiding over the transference of law one grows up the land as one grows up children.¹ Her genius, however, stems from individuation in her visual expressions of her Country Alhalkere, (Alalgura) (situated near Soakage Bore, Utopia, north east of Alice Springs and awelye (womens law ceremonies in Anmatyerre).

Kngwarreyes oeuvre is a collective expression of the interconnectedness of her physical self and Country, as well as the metaphysical associations of awelye, and attendant custodial responsibilities for nurturing the land and its bounty.

In Kngwarreyes visual language, paintings are glorious manifestations of Country, awelye, and self the whole lot a concept that was ever present in her work, across all styles and periods.² As Anne Marie Brody has observed, metaphor is a strong feature of Indigenous intellectual systems stories can be present in a single person, rock or tree.³ This fusion is evident in her naming: kame (kam) is the seed of the wild pencil yam atnulare (Vigna lanceolata) that grows across Alhalkere.

The present majestically scaled work, Desert Winter, represents the whole lot in a remarkable way: the artists physical and metaphysical passage through dry country the desert in winter is clearly visible in her technique. Painted in a drought year4 following her high colourist phase, Desert Winter is a celebratory meditation on the yam burgeoning under the soil.

The name Utopia originates from literature: a mythical oceanic paradise. In contrast, the region in Australias arid desert heart was, for colonist settlers and explorers, a forbidding place to be feared and conquered. Still seen by many as a harsh environment, the desert holds an abundance of resources readily available to those with intimate knowledge of the land. In dry time, water can be found in the roots of the desert oak, and wild yams lie nestled under the earth awaiting harvest. Desert

Winter glorifies this intimate and sacred knowledge in an expansive journey across place and metaphysical realms in Anmatyerre Country. Desert Winter is also important academically for its transitional mark making. Stylistically, it prefigures and coalesces the artists linear works of 1994-95, and the broader brushed final works of 1996.

As Kngwarreye worked the large canvas, one sees evidence of concentration and abandon in equal measure, attuned to the life cycle of the yam, and her reverence of Country within awelye. Both Margot Neale who describes Emilys stylistic virtuosity as simply shifting gears in a continuous trajectory linking time, place and image⁵ and Judith Ryan, posit that this characteristic of her oeuvre is its chief distinction from all other central and western desert artists, and key to her acclaim and viewers sensual engagement.⁶

Desert Winter is a glowing, glorifying expression of the yams life cycle and promise of survival expressed in a palette of pinks, oranges and the Alhalkere ceremonial yellow and red. Kngwarreye arouses and animates the sacred synchronicity between yam and awelye in overlapping and distinct sections and passages of technical virtuosity, contemplation and artistic exploration.

Neale makes the connection between Kngwarreyes lifetime of ceremonial dancing, singing and mark-making and the rhythm of her paintings, which often reveal her practice of working in sections. She suggests this technique possibly derives from the method of body-painting where one breast is painted, then the other; one upper arm, then the other.⁷

Body markings exist as a metaphysical thread and painted line binding all of Kngwarreyes works, across all styles and periods, illuminating continuities of purpose, presence and place, of spirit, mind and being. Desert Winters composition and stylistic variances reveal the nexus between physical and metaphysical planes, and is testament to what has been described as mobilising a realm of intelligibility that produced the Aboriginal world.⁸

Christopher Hodges is definitive: In her terms there is no distinction between dot-filled landscapes and striped body paintings.⁹ Lines and grid structures, most apparent in the right quadrant of Desert Winter, are thus awelye linkages between yam roots, mapping references, body markings Kngwarreyes whole lot, while elsewhere, body marks are loosened in space, laid next to each other like leaves of sword grass.¹⁰ Shifting the essence of this practice to the poetic, Ryan offers T.S. Eliots musing, In my beginning is my end in my end is my beginning.¹¹ In Desert Winter, we see this ethereal statement made apparent.

Kngwarreyes oeuvre has found appreciation within academic explorations of representational landscape painting as well as abstract art, especially abstract expressionism.¹² While these genres may seem contradictory in the canon of western modernism, philosophical thinking helps collapse these divergent critical paradigms and shines new light on her practice.

Sally Butler posits that Kngwarreyes art can usefully be considered in terms of the enigmatic, a discourse that embodies a dialectic of representation and resistance.¹³ This accords with Neales conjecture: that ceremonial engagement can take place with any of her paintings produces a major problem for any who see them as examples of abstract art,¹⁴ noting that her visual theory was awelye, not the theory of modernist art critics.¹⁵

Butlers thesis ponders this problematic space, suggesting that the enigmatic object of discourse describes a complex relationship between Kngwarreyes artworks and a climate of reception that is coming to terms with the occasional opacity of cultural difference.¹⁶ More recently, Tony Ellwood has stated that academic reflection has finally led to a new art history,¹⁷ which is supported by Ian McLeans declaration that it will be clear that this is contemporary art quite inside the realm of Aboriginality, and as modern as any other society.¹⁸   

Kngwarreyes focus exploring the fertile energy of her countrys life cycles, and in particular, the pencil yam atnulare and wild potato anaroolya (also referenced as a yam) has resulted in an extraordinary body of sublime and celebrated work, within which Desert Winter is a powerful example exhibiting the artists organic uninhibitedness¹⁹, as well as fluidity as structure.²⁰

Roger Benjamin highlights approach as key to Kngwarreyes genius, especially her rare ability elaborating new styles pursued through a developmental series that contained tentative beginning, mature demonstrations, and a falling off of interest that merged with the nascent forms of her next work.²¹ If there has been one work presented to the market that epitomises this cycle in a single vision, it is Desert Winter.

Neale has declared that Kngwarreye made us see abstract art differently, but more importantly, that we now see the landscape differently. This shift is monumental: the desert is no longer the dead centre landscape of Giles and Warburton, but Kngwarreye Country. Desert Winter is simultaneously a monumental view of the land, and its Anmatyerre voice.²²

Kngwarreyes significance was acknowledged and celebrated with the prestigious Australian Artists Creative Fellowship award, bestowed in 1992. Her work has rightfully held pride of place in several international exhibitions of Australian art, including the 1997 Venice Biennale, and her exceptional talent showcased in two solo retrospective exhibitions, most recently Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, which toured Japan in 2008. Her position in Australias pantheon of great painters is assured.

Footnotes
1. Bell, D., Person and Place: Making Meaning of the Art of Australian Indigenous Women, Feminist Studies, Volume: 28, Issue 1, 2002, p.103
2. Oft referenced; for full quote see Isaacs, J., Smith, T., and Ryan J., et al, Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p.31
3. Quoted in Neale, M., Two Worlds: One Vision, Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1998, p.24
4. For reflections on the drought, see Donald Holt, Emily, a Personal Memoir, in Isaacs et al, op.cit., pp. 143-147
5. Neale, M., Alkalhere, her only subject: Theme, in Marks of Meaning: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia, ACT, 2008, p.224
6. Neale, M., The Body and Spirituality in Two worlds: One Vision, Emily Kame Kngwarreye:, op.cit., pp. 27 and 29. See also, Judith Ryan, The Artists Oeuvre, in In the Beginning is My End: The Singular Art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, ibid. p. 41  
7. Neale, M., The Body in Two worlds: One Vision, ibid., p.27
8. Ferrell, R., Dreaming, Sacred Exchanges: Images in Global Context, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, p.15
9. Hodges, C., Alhalkere, Emily Kame Kngwarreye:, op.cit., p.33
10. Smith, T., Kngwarreye Woman Abstract Painter, in Isaacs et al op.cit., p. 35, referencing another work from 1994, We Paint Up Big (94EO35), plate 53 (p.127). For other works with comparable transitional stylistic elements see, ibid., plates 46 (p. 117), 49, 50 (pp. 120-21), and Emily Kame Kngwarreye:, op.cit., plates 78, 79 (pp. 123-4)
11. Ryan, J., In the beginning is my end: the singular art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, ibid., p.39
12. See Benjamin, R., A New Modernist Hero, ibid., pp. 47-54, and Smith, T., Kngwarreye Woman Abstract Painter, in Isaacs et al, op.cit., pp. 24-42
13. Butler, S., Emily Kngwarreye and the Enigmatic Object of Discourse, PHD thesis, University of Queensland, 2002, p.3
14. Neale, M., Spirituality in Two worlds: One Vision, Emily Kame Kngwarreye:, op.cit., p.29
15. Neale, M., The same, but different: Style in Marks of Meaning: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Utopia:, op.cit., p.232
16. Butler, op.cit., p.3
17. Ellwood, T., Reflecting on Emily: a personal response in Utopia:, op.cit., p. 0
18. McLean, I., Aboriginal Modernism? Two Histories, one Painter, ibid., p.28 (emphasis added)
19. Ryan, J., In the beginning is my end: the singular art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Emily Kame Kngwarreye:, op.cit., p.40
20. Smith, T., Kngwarreye Woman Abstract Painter, in Isaacs et al op.cit., p. 31
21. Benjamin, R., The Cult of Formal Development, in A New Modernist Hero, Emily Kame Kngwarreye:, op.cit., p.48
22. Hers is not a view of the land, but rather its voice, Neale, M., Marks of Meaning: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Utopia:, op.cit., p.247

Jane Raffan BA Hons. (Fine Arts); Grad.Dip. Environmental Law (Ethical Dealing Art & Cultural Heritage