Emily Kame Kngwarreye | 'Untitled' | 83x88cm

Code: TOAAC697

Artist: Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Title: Untitled

Area: Utopia (Sandover region), NT

Community: Anmatyerre

Medium: Acrylic On Belgian Linen

Size: 83x88cm

Year: 0000

Emily Kame Kngwarreye's awelye paintings return again and again to the ceremonial body paint of Anmatyerre women's law — the marks drawn across the upper body, breasts and arms in preparation for ceremony. The sweeping bands and repeated strokes recall the motion of the hand applying ochre and clay to skin, a gesture of belonging to country and to the knowledge held by senior women. In these works the body and the land become the same surface, painted with the same hand.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is widely regarded as one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century. An Anmatyerre woman born around 1910 at Alhalkere in the Utopia homelands, north-east of Alice Springs, she spent the greater part of her life on her country as a senior custodian of its ceremonies and sites, working for a period on surrounding cattle stations. Her formal art career began in 1977, when batik was introduced to Utopia women through an adult education program; she became a founding member of the Utopia Women's Batik Group in 1978 and worked in silk batik for more than a decade. It was only in late 1988, in her late seventies, that she first took up acrylic on canvas as part of a community painting project, producing Emu Woman, a work that drew immediate national attention. Over the eight years that followed she painted with extraordinary intensity, an estimated three thousand or more works, and moved through a remarkable succession of styles: dense veils of fine dots, high-key colourist canvases, the loaded-brush dump dump dotting, the sinuous linear yam paintings of 1994 and 1995, the bold awelye stripe works, and finally the stripped-back gestural colour fields of her last months. All of it remained an expression of a single subject: Alhalkere, her country, and the ancestral knowledge held within it. Her paintings hang in every major Australian public collection and in institutions abroad.