13th July 2025

Indigenous Australian Artist Emily Kam Kngwarray at the Tate Modern, London

The Tate Modern in London has just opened a new exhibition on the Indigenous Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (c. 1910-1996). Born in her ancestral lands, in the Utopia region north of Alice Springs in the centre of Australia, she was a woman of the Alhalker speech group. She spoke little English and did not have children. She lead a traditional life and was adept at preparing traditional food (‘bush tucker’) catching and roasting lizards and the like and digging for wild yams. For most of her adult life she worked on a white-owned cattle station, minding children, rounding up cattle and the like, and as was the practice at the time, received not money but supplies in kind.

Indigenous people were given land rights into the 1970s and 1980s and with that came more of an attempt to provide more skills for people in the remote communities. Late in life Emily was introduced to batik making along with other women in her community. This allowed them to translate the traditional designs in natural ochres they applied to their bodies for ritual dance occasions into a more sustained format. Later, she was introduced to acrylic paint and canvas, and so for just the last six or seven years of her life, she painted in oil at a furious pace, producing possibly as many as 3,000 paintings before her death in 1996.

She drew on the landscape and native foods for her inspiration. The ‘Kam’ part of her name referred to native pencil yams which the local people ate and the spirally, spindly yam was a frequent motif in her work.

Large canvases were produced, usually by Emily sitting on the ground, cross-legged while she painted with a rudimentary brush. Her natural sense of colour and composition was masterful and increasingly, she is being considered as among the 20th century’s most important contemporary artists for her uniqueness, originality, raw talent and the way in which her work has inspired other artists worldwide.

Traditional people in Australia’s interior have a strong sense of sharing their wealth – any income or assets earned or possessed by one community member is seen as belonging to the entire community, so Emily benefited little materially in a direct manner from her work. And it is also likely that some of her works were not the product of her alone but other members of the community, particularly as the commercial demand for her paintings rose. But this is little different to how Damien Hirst or Andy Warhol have operated with their studios or ‘factories’ where they have overseen and inspired others working with them.

Emily did not sign or document her works, so provenance is extremely important, especially as her works can now sell for millions. It is likely that there are now many fakes and forgeries, so a provenance trail going all the way back to the few dealers who dealt with her and her community at the time is necessary.

The Tate Modern’s exhibition is large and varied. It covers the three main styles/periods of Emily’s painting career. There are dozens of paintings across several spacious rooms. It is rare to see so many Emily paintings in one place, and the paintings have been drawn from collections in Australia, Europe, the US and the UK. There is an excellent catalogue as well.

The exhibition is on until January, 2026.

Works from the exhibition are below.

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