Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, also spelt Emily Kam Kngwarray, was born c. 1910 in Alhalkere in the Utopia Homelands, an Aboriginal community located approximately 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs (Mparntwe).

Her family was Anmatyerre, and she was the youngest of three.

She had no biological children of her own.

She was the sister-in-law of the artist Minnie Pwerle and the aunt of Pwerle's daughter, artist Barbara Weir.

Kngwarreye was a parental custodian of Weir for seven years until Weir was forcibly removed from her homeland under a government program to assimilate mixed-race children (see Stolen Generations).

Kngwarreye's great niece is the painter Jeannie Pwerle.

Her brother's children are Gloria Pitjana Mills and Dolly Pitjana Mills.

Kngwarreye grew up working on cattle stations.

In June 1934 she moved to the MacDonald Downs Homestead, located approximately 100 km east of Alhalkere, to work in the house and muster cattle.

In the 1970s, Kngwarreye undertook a short adult education course which it included various creative practices, including such as tie-dyeing and batik.

Bryce and Green had imported the medium of batik to the Northern Territories from Indonesia in 1974.

By the time Kngwarreye was introduced to the technique, Aboriginal artists had adapted key parts of the process to suit their own preferences.

The Indonesian technique of applying wax with a pen-like instrument called a canting, for example, had been replaced by brushes, which often produced broader, more animated patterns on the fabric.

The introduction of batik marked a new era for Aboriginal women in the Northern Territories.

Up to that point, their role had been to assist male painters, with only a few women ever creating their own works.

In 1977, she began to learn batik under the early guidance of a Pitjantjatjara artist from Ernabella named Yipati and instructors Suzanne Bryce, Jenny Green and Julia Murray.

According to Bryce, Aboriginal women in the region wanted to learn handcrafts because they were especially suited for a traditional lifestyle.

In 1978, Kngwarreye and other prominent Aboriginal artists founded the Utopia Women's Batik Group, comprising around 21 women.

Initially a communal project, the program evolved into a framework where artists could develop their own individual styles.

Kngwarreye's batik work shows elements that recur in her later paintings, including the awelye (body painting), emus, goannas, and other flora and fauna of her Country.

She worked in batik for 11 years until 1988, when she was introduced to acrylics.

She created more than 3,000 acrylic paintings over the next eight years, and became one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of Indigenous Australian art.

She is particularly notable also for being a female artist, for having only started painting in her 70s, and for her prolificacy: over her eight years as an artist, she produced more than 3,000 paintings – around one per day.

She lived and worked at various places in the Sandover region.

Kngwarreye began to paint on canvas in the summer of 1988, with a painting project initiated by CAAMA Shop in association with Utopia Art Sydney.

Titled A Summer Project, it was eventually acquired by the Holmes à Court Collection in West Perth which then sponsored a program to allow Utopia artists to paint for a period of time unhindered by commercial imperatives.

Rodney Gooch, manager of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA), distributed 100 canvases and paints to the Utopia women, where they instructed the artists in the new medium.

Over the summer holidays, (4 weeks) 80 painters completed 81 works.

Rodney Gooch saw this as a new era for women.

The Holmes à Court Collection purchased all 81 paintings and through their curator Anne Marie Brody, they were exhibited in April at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney.

Kngwarreye once described her transition to acrylic painting as a less labor-intensive process that better suited her advancing years:"I did batik at first, and then after doing that I learned more and more and then I changed over to painting for good...Then it was canvas. I gave up on...fabric to avoid all the boiling to get the wax out. I got a bit lazy – I gave it up because it was too much hard work. I finally got sick of it ... I didn't want to continue with the hard work batik required – boiling the fabric over and over, lighting fires, and using up all the soap powder, over and over. That's why I gave up batik and changed over to canvas – it was easier. My eyesight deteriorated as I got older, and because of that I gave up batik on silk – it was better for me to just paint."Her method was to place large sections of canvas on the ground and sit on them cross-legged.

She applied paint using a long brush to reach across and into the creation.

In one account, a dealer explained the presence of dog prints within a specific painting as a natural part of her ground-level method: "The dog walked across it," he said, "and she couldn't have cared less."

In 1995, in the last year of her life, she painted Anwerlarr anganenty ("Big yam Dreaming"), on a huge canvase measuring over 8 m by nearly 3 m.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (also spelt Emily Kam Kngwarray) (1910 – 3 September 1996) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory.

After only starting painting as a septuagenarian, Kngwarreye became one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of Indigenous Australian art.

Kngwarreye died in Alice Springs in September 1996.

As an elder and ancestral custodian of the Anmatyerre people, Kngwarreye had for decades painted for ceremonial purposes in the Utopia region.

In the final two weeks of her life, Kngwarreye asked her nephew Fred Torres for materials to produce a series known today as My Country - Final Series, 1996.

A gallerist of Indigenous art in Sydney once described the period as an energetic push to create: "With no other materials, she dipped her one-inch gesso brush into a pot of paint. Over the next few days Emily painted 24 canvases like nothing she had ever done before."