Bibliography
Kelli Cole, Jennifer Green & Hetti Perkins (éd.), Emily Kam Kngwarray, cat. exp. Londres, Tate Modern, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 2025.
Matthias Haldemann (éd.), My Mother Country – Aboriginal Dot Painting, cat. exp. Zoug, Kunsthaus, Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2022.
Margo Neale (éd.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, cat. exp. Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 2008.
Emily Kam Kngwarray was born around 1914 in the Aboriginal territory of Utopia, northern Australia. She was an ancestral custodian and ceremonial painter for the Anmatyerr people. Her artistic practice began in the 1970s with batik, leading her to become a founder member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. As she neared her eightieth birthday, she turned to acrylics on canvas, heralding a new, and exceptionally prolific, stage in a career that saw her become a leading representative of Aboriginal art.
Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work is often associated with abstraction, though in truth it lies beyond the categories of analysis applied to Western art. Her art is deeply rooted in her close-knit bond with the land she called home. Painting every day was a way for her to express the value system underpinning her culture. Her compositions arranged around lines, dots, contours, and arcs reflect Australian ecosystems and the natural world. Her motifs also gesture to the body painting practiced by Anmatyerr women for Awelye ceremonies, when ancestral lore, spiritual bonds with the earth, and traditional healing rites are celebrated and passed down to the next generation. The title of this painting, Summer Awelye, points to this practice. Its rich tones of orange and red laid down in broad, layered swathes are typical of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work. The successive layers of acrylics create a work of remarkable subtlety.