Emily Kam Kngwarray Anmatyerr language group, circa 1914-1996
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Alhalkere - Old Man Emu with Babies, 1989 -
Untitled, 1990
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Untitled (Alhalkere), 1990
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Song of the Emu, 1991
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Mourning, 1991
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Untitled – Alhalkere, 1992
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Untitled (Alhalker), 1993
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Merne Everything VI, 1994
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Untitled (Alhalkerre), 1995
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Kame Yam Awelye, 1996
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Untitled, 1996
Alternative spellings: Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Working in a remote, north-west corner of the Simpson Desert, on land annexed by pastoral leases during the 1920s, Emily Kam Ngwarray became, in the final decade of her life, perhaps the most celebrated and sought after Australian artist of her time.
A leading figure in eastern Anmatyerr ceremony, Ngwarray was also the artist in whose work many white Australians first felt the force of an Indigenous art that could be seen to negotiate a space both within the aesthetics of Western abstraction and the timeless precepts of Aboriginal cultural traditions.
"Ngwarray attained artistic maturity as a woman in her seventies, not long converted to the techniques of painting on canvas, but with decades of painting in a ceremonial context and activity with the Utopia Women’s Batik Group behind her – as well as life as a camel handler and stockhand. In an extraordinarily prolific eight years of professional painting, she produced magnificent canvases in which she appears to have aimed for essentialist visions of the multiplicities and connectedness of her country, as imaged in terms of its organic energies. Ngwarray’s vital traceries both conform to, and seem to expand beyond, her clan codes, in abstractions of ceremonial markings and imagery of her country’s flora and fauna.
During the early 1990s, Ngwarray developed a painting technique that literally embodied her sense of the explosive, yet ordered, rhythms of the natural world: she energetically worked her canvas with fluid dots or blobs of colour that formed a pulsing layer over the ‘mapped-out’ underpinnings of her paintings. Later, she embraced the austerities of stripe compositions, and in seething, linear ‘yam Dreaming’ paintings, before she created the remarkable blocky gestural abstractions of 1996, the final year of her life." (Deborah Edwards in 'Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2014)
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, ed., Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Melbourne, 1990
Takeo Uchiyama, Crossroads - Towards a New Reality: Aboriginal Art from Australia, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 1992
Margo Neale, Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, Macmillan Publishers, Melbourne, 1998
Jennifer Isaacs, Terry Smith, Judith Ryan, Donald Holt and Janet Holt, Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, 1998
Susan McCulloch, Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Rebirth of an Ancient Culture, McCulloch and McCulloch Australian Art Books, Sydney, 2001
Margo Neale and Benita Tunks (eds.), Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbun Tokyo Honsha, 2008, (Japanese edition), Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2008 (English edition)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty, Beyond Sacred: Recent painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty, Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011
Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins, Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, 2023
Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, UOVO, 2023
Elizabeth Fortescue, "Superstar of Australian art Emily Kam Kngwarray to get Tate Modern show in 2025." The Art Newspaper, 1 December, 2023
Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Enterprises Ltd, London, 2025
Films and Television Programs:
Women of Utopia, directed by Keith Gow, produced by Elisabeth Knight, Film Australia for the National Aboriginal Employment Development Committee, 1984.
The golden cord, directed by Hilary Furlong and released by Ronin Films, 1996.
art + soul, directed by Warwick Thornton, written and presented by Hetti Perkins, produced by Bridget Ikin & Joanne McGovern, music by David Page, Screen Australia and Hibiscus Films in association with Screen NSW, Art Gallery of New South Wales, ABC and Australia Council for the Arts, 2010.