Cultural Memory and the Concept of Country in “Emily Kam Kngwarray” at Tate Modern

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1600348" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/6.-Emily-Kam-Kngwarray-Untitled-awely-1994.-NGA-%C3%82%C2%A9-Emily-Kam-Kngwarray-Copyright-Agency.-Licensed-by-DACS-2025.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A wide multi-panel painting is composed of vertical columns of hand-painted horizontal stripes in earthy reds, browns, purples and whites." width="970" height="540" data-caption='Emily Kam Kngwarray, <em>Untitled (awely)</em>, 1994. From the NGA collection. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>© Emily Kam Kngwarry, Licensed by DACS 2025</span>’>

Remarkably, Emily Kam Kngwarray only spent around eight years painting. Born in Alhalkere, Utopia in Australia’s Northern Territory in 1910, Kngwarray was aged eighty-six when she died. For most of her life, she helped her family bring up their kids and worked on cattle stations. Then, in her late seventies, she began to paint. And what paintings she made. London’s Tate Modern gallery is staging Europe’s first expansive, detailed solo exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s artistic contributions and the show reverberates with an otherworldly wisdom.

When Kngwarray was born, Utopia was a broad area of grazing pasture leased from the Australian government. In 1978, the region was recognized as a true homeland of the Anmatyerr and the Alyawarre Aboriginal tribes and returned to their care. Kngwarray was an Anmatyerr elder and her artwork sways gracefully with the history of her people and the Dreaming, the Aboriginal origin story of the universe and everything within it.

The awely ceremonies, wherein women sing and dance in celebration and homage to the earth’s fertility, are a central element in Kngwarray’s vision. The women paint their bodies with ground ochres for the rituals and Kngwarray transported these decorations to her paintings. Her mighty five meter-long Yam awely painting, made the year before she died, is a dizzy reel of a picture. Kngwarray’s favored earth tones and uncut jewel colors weave across the canvas as if following nature’s meandering rhythms. Kngwarray laid her canvases out flat on the ground and painted sitting on the floor, giving her work the levitational quality of an aerial view. It might reasonably be imagined that her marks show the images seen by spirits floating above the land.

Emily Kam Kngwarray’s first artistic experiments began in the 1970s when she learned the process of batik printing and a selection of her fabric prints is on show here too. Majestic in scale, the decorated textiles hang elegantly in the center of the room. The art of batik had been introduced as part of a government-backed education program and the women of Utopia used the initiative to illustrate that the art of the region was not just a male-only practice. Plus, local art had previously been confined to making marks on the ground, on bodies and on objects. Now the symbols and patterns could be transferred to fabric. The program also gave Kngwarray the chance to cut her artistic teeth and her painted works that followed sprouted from the freedom batik printing had unlocked.

As Kngwarray’s output reached warp speed, she produced around three thousand paintings during her eight-year sprint and, along with the awely ceremonies, Alhalkere’s ecology inhabited her work. The “Kam” part of Kngwarray’s name came from the seedpods (a.k.a., kam) of the pencil yam vegetable and she painted the seeds, yams and other flora of the area, as well as its indigenous birds and animals. Made in 1991, Kam is a testament to the kam’s importance, as thousands of seed-like blotches swarm across the canvas, ready to settle down and find a place to grow. Marking Kngwarray’s transition from batik to painting with acrylics, her Emu Woman artwork from 1988 is of a barely discernible naked female torso dancing in tribute to the native bird. Included in the “A Summer Project: Utopia Women’s Paintings” exhibition held at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery in 1989, Emu Woman launched Kngwarray’s artistic career. Not bad going for an artist’s first-ever painting.

Ntang grass seeds figure in another early painting, Ntang Dreaming, the punctuating blobs underlining Kngwarray’s gift for enveloping dazzling intricacy within deceptive simplicity. Ntang 1990 is a collection of green, orange and off-white dots. Or is it? Zoom in and there are undulating ribbons and shapes embedded mysteriously beneath the splodges. Ridges appear and disappear like mountains at dawn and dusk. Kngwarray’s dot work makes Damien Hirst’s spot paintings look like a cynical exercise in churned-out commercial opportunism. Her wavy lines are liberating and spiritual. The Alhalker suite from 1993 is a humongous mosaic of twenty-two canvases that works as a gorgeously hectic portrait of Kngwarray’s beloved landscape decked out in blooming wildflowers.

The year after Kngwarray died, her work was represented in the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There are no records that explain why her output was not included while she was alive. However, the 1997 Pavilion did also include artwork by Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson in a move that helped the entrenched art world understand the culture, skills and importance of female Australian Aboriginal artists. Emily’s Untitled (Awely) canvases from 1994 were part of the Pavilion’s display and they feature here. A six-panel piece, the paintings look like layers of stratified earth or rows of roughly ploughed furrows.

The concept of Country is an intrinsic facet of the Australian Aboriginal people’s relationship with their home. Country connects them to their ancestors and to the land that provides them with food and shelter. As much as anything, Kngwarray’s artwork gently explains the importance of Country. It is almost as if her pieces were completed by (whisper it) a higher force. And if all this sounds a bit gushy, who cares? This is artwork that can lift the lowest of spirits.

“Emily Kam Kngwarray” is at Tate Modern through January 11, 2026. Advanced booking is advised.

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