

A profound expression of spirit, history, and place, Untitled (Alhalker) by Emily Kam Kngwarray (alternately spelled Kame Kngwarreye) is a masterwork of the First Nation Australian artist’s acclaimed output. As an elder Anmatyerr woman from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory, Kngwarray created mesmerising paintings that encapsulate the remarkable experience and socio-cultural authority she gained throughout her extraordinary life. Her dynamic paintings, including the present monumental example, represent a response to the land of her birth, Alhalker – the contours of the landscape, its life-giving flora and fauna, the flowing waters and flooding rains, the seasonal cycles, and the spiritual forces that permeate the land. As a custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan country, Kngwarray also brings to her art the shared cultural narratives, lore, and symbols of her people. The enactment of these powerful connections to her community and country through ancestral history was an essential practice that became inherent to her artmaking, and informed the gestures, hues, and styles of her work. Although she began painting on canvas when she was 79 years old, Kngwarray had already spent many years working with sand, ceremonial body painting, and batik designs on silk, bringing a lifetime of other methods of expression to bear on her later output. As a result, Kngwarray is widely considered to be one of the most significant and celebrated artists in Australia’s history; befitting her importance, Kngwarray will be the subject of a recently announced major solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London, opening in 2025, following a major retrospective currently on view at the National Gallery of Australia. Distinguished by its exceptional scale, vivid colouration, and extravagantly lavish surface, Untitled is an evocative masterpiece of Kngwarray’s singular career.

Inspired by her role as an Anmatyerre elder and the landscape of Alhalker, her clan country, Kngwarray’s paintings respond to the totality of her heritage. Even her method of application reflects long-held traditions: using brushes, sticks, and fingertips, she painted on unstretched linen laid flat on the ground, sitting beside or within the composition itself, in a similar manner that she used for making sand paintings for women’s ceremonies. Although works like Untitled (Alhalker) appear formally abstract, composed of dots, lines, and coloured fields, these gestures are drawn from her cultural traditions of storytelling; they often resemble the vegetation, animals, and landscape of the country as well as the symbols of her people. Here, the “dots within dots” that proliferate across the surface, characteristic of Kngwarray’s work, represent plant seeds native to her land, while the pink, gold and white palette evokes the natural surroundings. As Kngwarray herself explained, “Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), arlatyeye (pencil yam), arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), ntange (grass seed), tingu (Dreamtime pup), ankerre (emu), intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), atnwerle (green bean), and kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot” (the artist interviewed by Rodney Gooch, translated by Kathleen Petyarre, in Michael Boulter, The Art of Utopia: A New Direction in Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Sydney 1991, p. 61). Kngwarray’s work thus occupies numerous formal positions simultaneously: figurative, symbolic, and conceptual.

Historically, the Anmatyerre- and Alyawarre-speaking people made visual images for thousands of years on ceremonial objects, on their bodies, and on the ground. Their shared symbols, stories, and ancestral knowledge is guarded and passed down through intricate designs and rituals; Kngwarray, as a senior custodian of this knowledge, known as Alweye, had been creating such visual media for decades. During the 1970s, Anmatyerre women performed Awelye to demonstrate their ownership of territories, stories and Dreamings, which played a critical role in reclaiming their rights to the land. In 1977, a government sponsored workshop brought the traditionally Indonesian technique of making batik fabric to a group of women in Utopia; the following year the Utopia Women's Batik Group was formed (with Kngwarray as a founding member), and the fabrics became a new creative repository for traditional imagery. Kngwarray’s batik style was quickly distinguished by her exploration of different styles and her bold inventiveness with form and colour, as she translated the abundant visual material of ritual and ceremonial history into intricate compositions on silk.

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Untitled (Batik), 1981. © Emily Kam Kngwarray
Kngwarray employed a plethora of styles over the course of her career, developing her practice through a series of phases. In her early works on canvas, she preferred earthy ochre colours, reflecting her experience using natural pigments during ceremonies. Over time, she expanded her palette to include a striking array of hues inspired by the desert landscape, each with metaphorical significance: yellow, as in the present work for instance, symbolises the season when the earth begins to dry and the Kame (yam seeds) are ripe. Beyond colour, Kngwarray also evolved the visual elements of her painting to expand the symbolic and natural referents of her compositions through experimentation with form, pictorial space and technical conventions. The extraordinary depth and richness of Kngwarray’s output prompted curator and author Margo Neale to remark:
“[Kngwarray] was arguably Australia's greatest painter of the land. No artist has painted their country the way she has, inflecting it with her personal vision and innovative style. Her ability to penetrate the soul of this land and capture the hearts, minds and imagination of the Australian audience is beyond art. It is also beyond our cultural linguistic impasse to articulate the full power of her work. Hers is not a view of the land, but rather its voice. She re-scaled the landscape with a cosmic dimension akin to a landscape of the Aboriginal mind, and this perspective is being written into the global imagination.”

Over the past 30 years, Kngwarray’s art has been considered in terms of other formal artistic traditions, as some aspects relate to and overlap with both Western abstraction and Eastern aesthetics. Some have compared her work stylistically to the titans of Modernism, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Mark Rothko, as Kngwarray’s layering of hues and repeated dots seemingly resonates with the technical and colouristic approaches of Abstract Expressionism. Others have drawn parallels between Kngwarray’s symbolic shapes and the sinuous lines of Japanese calligraphy. However, while these comparisons may be useful in positioning her work within a Western understanding of the art-historical canon, they ultimately belie some of the fundamental complexities of how uninitiated audiences grapple with Kngwarray’s art, since its full meaning will forever be elusive to those outside her culture. Her painting practice was the artistic expression of her role in a cultural worldview that framed all of existence—people, animals, and land; past, present, and future; body, mind, and spirit—and the present work is a magisterial example of the stunning imagery and universal themes that reside within Kngwarray’s work.