Emily Kam Kngwarray

Painted at Soakage Bore, Utopia, in 1990

Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Shop, Alice Springs

Anne Marie Brody, Perth, acquired from the above in 1990

by Anne Marie Brody and Wally Caruana

These two early paintings Untitled (Intekw), 1990, and Untitled (Kam), 1990 (Lot 27), are among the most intimate pictures that Emily created. Spontaneous and reflective, these small panels express Kngwarray’s abiding themes and deep identity as a ceremonial leader and custodian of Alhalker and its stories. The sparse details of how these works came to be painted also offer a rare perspective on Kngwarray’s agency and practice in this early period. These boards were not commissioned by one of her agents,¹ but apparently taken up by Kngwarray in an impromptu moment and painted by her—perhaps in the same instant as others in her circle were carving and incising boards for the Utopia Suite, a major woodcut project then underway in several camps across Utopia.

Commissioned in April 1990, the Utopia Suite was the sixth (and last) of a succession of community-wide art projects devised by the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Shop manager Rodney Gooch (1949-2002) who took on the role of coordinating the Utopia Women’s Batik (UWB) group in September 1987. This collective had been batiking for over ten years when Gooch began working with them. Within a few months, he initiated a new template for commissioning as a way of getting to know the group and their cultural affiliations. His approach involved a focus on inclusive, thematic and innovative projects alongside the more customary model of commissioning individual pieces marked for exhibition and sale.

Kngwarray was a formidable presence and authority in the first two CAAMA-Utopia projects—the mid 1988 batik collection of 88 silk batiks called Utopia. A Picture Story finalised in June 1988 and the second, following in December, Utopia Women’s Paintings. A Summer Project. The first works on canvas, an experimental survey in paint and canvas resulting in 81 canvases by 80 artists. Emu Woman, Kngwarray’s first work in the new medium, marked the beginning of her stellar career as a painter.²

The third CAAMA-Utopia project, an experiment with watercolour, was commissioned in February 1989, although Kngwarray did not participate and the reasons for her absence are not recorded. It is not until February and March the following year that the next two community-wide projects are executed, with Kngwarray again making a major contribution to both.

Gooch proposed ‘body paint’ as the theme for these two closely related projects resulting in two large collections—one comprising canvases measuring 60 x 90 cm stretched over oval boards and the second of 30 x 45 cm rectangular boards. Kngwarray’s oval and board both depicted a single iconic motif, a re-creation of the traditional body paint designs women paint on their chests, upper arms and neckline on ceremonial occasions. Most other contributions were pictorially more elaborate. Independently of the project, Kngwarray painted a further seven boards that depicted the body paint motif (with some variations) in the same way.³ Apart from her interest in continuing to paint this image, these ex-project paintings indicate that there were enough surplus boards in circulation for her to do so.⁴

Kngwarray did not directly participate in the next large-scale commission, the Utopia Suite—the sixth and final CAAMA-Utopia project that followed in mid-April. The concept was proposed to Gooch in early 1990 by Christopher Hodges and Helen Eager, Sydney based artists who had become agents for CAAMA Shop in early 1988.⁵ Their project followed the structure of Gooch’s previous CAAMA-Utopia surveys and again attracted a core group of UWB artists. The Utopia Suite resulted in a collection of 72 prints by 68 artists.⁶ However, Kngwarreye was not among them—although we do know that she was at her Soakage Bore camp at the time since Hodges reported that she ‘declined’ to do a woodcut. The reason is a matter of speculation but it is possible that the carving technique did not suit her, considering that after her first experience of paint and canvas she emphatically preferred that medium.

As with the ‘extra’ body paint boards Kngwarray had so recently painted, there would have been once again many ‘spare’ boards related to the woodcut project circulating in her camp at the time. Untitled (Intekw) and Untitled (Kam) are evidence that Kngwarreye had an interest in garnering at least two ‘spare’ boards to paint on if not carve.⁷

These two 30 x 45 cm panels Untitled (Kam), 1990, and Untitled (Intekw), painted on the sidelines of the Utopia Suite, are the last of a small cluster of nine boards (including seven with body paint) painted by Kngwarray in 1990. Forsaking the body designs of the previous month, these two boards introduce new subject matter connected in a different way with Kngwarreye’s identity. The fact that Untitled (Kam) has been painted over a landscape carved by another artist is intriguing —particularly given the scarcity of information about Kngwarreye’s ‘studio’ life in this period.

The carving is most likely done by Lily Sandover Kngwarray, a lifetime friend and companion to the older and more culturally senior Emily Kam Kngwarray. Of 72 woodcuts by 68 artists that form the Utopia Suite, one is by Lily Sandover Kngwarray. Several aspects of her woodcut composition make an interesting comparison with the board that Emily painted over—including the tree identically placed in the lower right of the image; the rays of the sun streaming from the upper middle edge; and the dominant zig-zag motif. Given that Emily decided not to carve a board, did she then look around for a spare or ask Lily Sandover for one of hers?

But whilst we can only guess at how Kngwarray came by the two boards she painted, the carving does allow us to place one, and by association its companion, in the same time frame as the Utopia Suite. The works and their imagery are also linked aesthetically, as brief stand out moments of realism in a painting career famous for abstraction.

When Rodney Gooch showed these to the collector, he said, with much emphasis referring to the woodcut project: ‘she decided to paint hers’.

This board, perhaps a ‘spare’ or surplus to the project, is not carved but has been used by Kngwarreye to paint a deeply personal image of intekw [Scaevola parvifolia] or the plant that emus like to eat.

The importance of intekw to Kngwarreye is highly visible in her imagery in key batiks from the late eighties, notably in Emu Dreaming, her contribution to A Picture Story.⁸ In this batik, intekw is located close to the body paint motif for Alhalker. Another batik from the period is entirely covered in intekw. But perhaps this affirmation of identity is visually at its strongest in Kngwarray’s first painting Emu Woman where her portrayal of intekw branching reads like a spine holding everything in its place.

The way the plant is drawn showing the structure of the stem along with the detail of the pod and emerging tufts of the fan flower might remind a western viewer of a classic botanical drawing. Such naturalism is extremely rare in Kngwarray’s works but has an immediate parallel in the detail she has used to represent the seeds in Untitled (Kam). Given the cultural importance and totemic significance of the emu to the origin story of Alhalker, this image of intekw, by association, is akin to a self-portrait representing another aspect of Kngwarray’s totemic identity.⁹

¹ In this early period, Kngwarray’s two agents were CAAMA Shop in Alice Springs and Delmore Gallery which was based on Delmore Downs, a pastoral leasehold bordering on Utopia.

² Kelli Cole, Hetti Perkins and Jennifer Green (eds.), Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2024, p.41; Neale, M (ed), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery and Macmillan, Brisbane, 1998, p,16, Plate 8, cat.7.

³ Three of these paintings are in the collection of the Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales, and one in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. See Cole, K., J. Green and H. Perkins 2023:61.

⁴ Neale 1998, p.81, Plate 49, cat. 31

⁵ Hodges and Eager met Gooch in early 1988 and initially sold batik from their studio/home. They organised a number of exhibitions in commercial gallery spaces before establishing their own gallery Utopia Art Sydney in 1989.

⁶ Complete editions of the Utopia Suite are to be found in many prestigious collections including Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, the National Gallery of Australia, the Flinders University Art Museum, the Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

⁷ Both works were brought in to CAAMA Shop at the same time – making a total of nine ex-project boards recorded in Gooch’s archive.

⁸ Cole et al. 2023, p.35; Neale 1998, p.66, Plate 34, cat.3.

⁹ The tracks of the emu are depicted the left of the plant, and those of a kangaroo on the right; the latter is also an important figure in the creation of Alhalker. The painting may be read as a type of coat-of-arms, symbolic of Kngwarray’s totemic identity.