All posts tagged batik

Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Tate Modern

‘I paint my plant, the one I am named after… I am Kam.’

I fell instantly in love with contemporary Aboriginal art when I saw my first big selection of a range of artists at the British Museum’s Indigenous Australia exhibition back in 2015. Examples are on permanent display in the Museum’s Room 24.

What makes this exhibition at Tate Modern different from the BM shows is that it focuses on just one artist, Emily Kam Kngwarray. I expected to enjoy it but wondered whether one artist could justify having an entire suite of Tate Modern galleries devoted to her. The answer is a triumphant and eye-opening Yes!

Ntang Dreaming by Emily Kam Kngwarray, (1989) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025

Background

Emily Kam Kngwarray (born around 1910, died in 1996) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from Alhalker, in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory. The exhibition opens with a map and a detailed explanation of the tribal group she hailed from, along with some explanation of their traditions and languages, before going on to explain how Kngwarray’s paintings transmit stories and knowledge about the land and its peoples and flora and fauna which have been handed down over countless generations.

Kngwarray began her career in art relatively late: she worked with batik in the 1970s before transitioning to painting on canvas from the late 1980s. It was only in 1988 that she painted her first acrylic work, ‘Emu Woman’. Thus she was in her late 70s when she began painting in earnest, and for the next eight years until her death she painted prolifically, producing a substantial body of work that continues to make impact today. According to Wikipedia:

In 1996 Kngwarray died and in 1997 she posthumously represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. Her work has made an immense impact in Australia and globally, and has inspired many new generations of Aboriginal artists from Australia.

Her work is rarely seen outside Australia so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see now fewer than 80 works collected in one place, and it feels awesome. To quote the curators:

Over half a century ago, Aboriginal artists from Central Australia began experimenting with new ways of expressing their ongoing cultural traditions. For millennia they had drawn on the ground, etched designs into rock and wood, and painted on the body for ceremonies. They then started to create art using watercolour and acrylic paint, and techniques such as batik. Emily Kam Kngwarray was at the forefront of this artistic revolution. Her unique style and powerful creative vision gained international attention, redefining the scope of contemporary art across the world.

Her works initially feel abstract but are laced with figurative motifs derived from the distinct wildlife and geology of the desert ecosystems around her. In among the abstract fields of coloured dots you can make out schematic depictions of vines, seeds, lizards and emus.

Two types of information

The facts come in two flavours: 1) one is the extensive explanation of the Aboriginal culture Kngwarray was raised in and expresses in her works, quite a lot of information about a culture so different from ours that it’s sometimes quite challenging to process and remember all of it.

2) The second category is information about the shape of her career, above all the way Kngwarray evolved her style over her last few decade and experimented with different media, namely acrylic painting and batik. The shape of her career can be summarised as:

early batiks on silk or cotton
the first paintings on canvas
large-scale canvases
later, gestural works

From the early detailed batik dots to the later gestural lines, her colour palette broadens over time as the scale becomes steadily more monumental.

Aboriginal culture

Here are some of the key points about the Aboriginal culture she came from and depicted:

Dreamings

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, the concept of the Dreaming or Creation time is fundamental to their social, cultural and spiritual practices. Ancestral beings, popularly known as Dreamings, manifest themselves in Country and its many diverse life forms. Plants, animals and natural phenomena, such as wind, fire and rain, travel across Country, shaping landscapes as they go. Important places and their Dreamings are celebrated in songs and ceremonies. Of special significance to Kngwarray are ankerr (emus) and anwerlarr (pencil yams). Emily was herself was named after kam, the seeds and seedpods of the pencil yam.

Landscape

‘Landscape’ triggers misleading connotations if we think about it in the Western sense, as a territory which is essentially passive, either having been tamed by agriculture and land management, or wild in a carefully curated scenic way. For Kngwarray and her people ‘landscape’ refers to a sense of the relationships between all the elements of a territory, of the plants, animals, ancestors, tracks, ceremonies, seeds and more.

Ankerr

In Anmatyerr culture emus – large, flightless birds – are highly respected and the people have developed a rich and extensive lexicon of terms exclusively for them. For example, there are specific words for young and old emus as well as particular terms for parts of their bodies – their necks, feet and feathers – that do not apply to any other bird or animal.

Emu woman by Emily Kam Kngwarray (1988–89) © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025

Batiks

Batik is a form of textile art, originally from Indonesia. Artists draw their designs on the fabric with hot wax, using a brush or a small spouted tool called a canting. They can also use a wooden or metal stamp called a cap to make imprints with the wax. A batik artist must work quickly, before the wax cools. When the fabric is immersed in dye, the wax resists the dye, so only the parts without wax take up the colour. After the fabric is dry, the cloth can be waxed and dyed again to create elaborate, multicoloured designs. The beauty of the batik is fully revealed after the wax is removed.

One of the rooms in the exhibition contains a series of these batiks suspended to form a succession of hangings. These are wonderful and I returned to them again and again to savour their lovely designs, patterns, swirling shapes and vibrant colours.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing a set of her batik works (photo by the author)

Mid-period: the Alhalker Suite (1993)

The Alhalker Suite is widely seen as one of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s crowning achievements. It represents the desert country of her birth and conveys the cycles of nature and the spiritual forces that inhabit the landscape. The 22 panels take up a big wall and describe the land in flood, celebrating the coming of rain after long periods of drought. After the rain, brilliantly coloured wildflowers carpet the landscape and the soft-looking spinifex bushes appear beside the desert oak trees and blossoming wattle.

According to the curators, the 22 panels of this work can be displayed in any order as she didn’t determine the sequence or impose any limitations on the overall configuration. Each display creates a new combination.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing the 22 panels of the Alhalker Suite (1993) (photo by the author)

As you can see, these mid-90s paintings have gone beyond the early ‘dot’ paintings to use much bigger washes of colour, bigger chunks or blocks or shapes of colour. The effect is very different from the earlier works, a completely different aesthetic.

Gestural works / lines

In the mid-1990s, Kngwarray started working with thick stripes or lines of acrylic paint on paper and canvas (see installation view below). They are displayed in a room of their own and walking into this space is to enter another visual world, quite distinct from the batik/dot paintings, and from the blocks-of-colour works. This is something else again. Cumulatively, the effect of walking into each new room, each with a substantially different look and feel, really conveys the sense of a major artist who went through a number of styles and approaches, creating lovely works in each of them.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing some of her line or stripe paintings (photo by the author)

These stripe-line-gestural works may look the most abstract of her work but are actually derived from real objects. Some derive from awelye, the designs which Anmatyerr women paint on their bodies to take part in ceremonies (see video still below). Others, like the network of black lines on the work on the left in the photo below, reflect the complex network of vines thrown out by pencil yams across the surface of the earth.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing some of her line or stripe paintings (photo by the author)

Portrait of the artist

Photo of Emily Kam Kngwarray painting at Delmore Downs Station in 1994, taken by Greg Weight. I was pleased to see that she’s a southpaw, like me.

Emily Kam Kngwarray. Photo by Greg Weight

The video

One room is given over to a video. In early 2023, a women’s camp was held in Alhalker and Anangker Countries as part of the community consultations for this exhibition. It was an occasion for remembrance, reunion and celebration. The women searched for anwerlarr yams (pencil yams), which were prolific after summer rains. They shared their knowledge of other plants and animals that inspired Kngwarray’s artworks. We watch them wash, then paint their torsos, then perform dances while chanting.

In this still, note the shape of the body designs, with half circles like necklaces under the neck and vertical stripes on the breasts. This pattern of a smiley curve above two sets of vertical lines recurs in a number of Kngwarray’s earlier works.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern with a still from the video showing women elders who have painted their chests in order to dance and perform (photo by the author)

A lot of the film looks as if it was shot using cameras on a drone to move very slowly in that characteristic droney, slow-motion way, above the landscape. And this has been done very deliberately because it really helps you understand the relationship between the shape of the land – with its bushes and scrub and rocks, see from directly above – and the dotting style of Kngwarray’s early paintings. There really is a very close relationship between the visual impact of the predominantly brown, mottled earth, dotted with scrub, and the browns and ochres and mottled dots of her early paintings.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern with a still from the video showing women elders who have painted their chests in order to dance and perform (photo by the author)

I can’t find the exact film online. The one in the exhibition is only about three minutes long and has no news footage or voiceover from white people. This one was made by Tate, and includes many of the same shots (women painting and dancing, slow tracking shots of the earth) but is longer and, to be honest, a bit spoiled by the wordy commentary.

This is not only an outstanding exhibition, but a thought-provoking revelation that someone from such a poor, excluded, marginalised background could rise through sheer vision and talent to become such a powerful artistic force.

Related reviews

Relating to Ancestors @ the British Museum (May 2023)
Indigenous Australia @ the British Museum (April 2015)
Australia reviews
Tate Modern reviews
Women artists

Relating to Ancestors @ the British Museum

Walk in the main entrance of the British Museum, go through the central courtyard past the great round building in the middle and walk on through the archway into room 24. This room is titled ‘Living and Dying’ and contains cases exploring ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life and death’. There’s a number of display cases looking at particular aspects of this (big) subject via the customs and artefacts of First Peoples from around the world, a lot of them from around the Pacific, although some are from Africa. But four or so big display cases are devoted to artefacts and explanations about the culture of indigenous Australians, or Aborigines as we used to call them.

Note on the text

Just to be clear, I have lifted most of the text of this post directly from the British Museum wall labels and captions, so you can read exactly what the curators say.

Indigenous Australian beliefs

Indigenous Australians understand that ancestral beings created the land, the oceans and all living things, passing on knowledge of how to live from, and care for, the land. People burn bush-land to maintain the fertility of species and perform ceremonies to mark important life stages.

Ancestral knowledge is passed from one generation to the next through painting, dancing and telling stories about the great ancestral beings. It is embodied in the designs and materials of both art works and functional, everyday objects, and these vary greatly across the continent, reflecting the great environmental and cultural diversity of Australia.

The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia which attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia

Colonisation

Australia has been inhabited for at least 60,000 years, predating the modern human settlement of both Europe and the Americas. Although William Dampier visited the north-west coast of Australia in the late 1600s, and Captain Cook mapped the east coast in 1770, the permanent British occupation of the continent only began in 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, which established a penal colony at modern-day Sydney.

The first whites came into contact with the native peoples from the first day and relations between the white interlopers and black natives were troubled and sometimes violent from the start. However, some native peoples managed to stay out of contact with whites until as late as the 1980s, 200 years after the first settlement.

Weaving ancestral knowledge

Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders believed that ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants, and that the properties of plants embody ancestral knowledge. Maintaining land and sea resources, knowing how to use the different parts of plants, and creating objects from them, thus had a spiritual as well as practical side.

One case contains nine baskets demonstrating the wide variety of styles and materials used by the hundreds of different clans or peoples ranged right across Australia’s diverse environment.

Aboriginal dilly-bag (1925) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Dealing with death

Purukapali is a major ancestral being for the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands. In accordance with ancestral law laid down by Purukapali, Islanders mark death with public funeral ceremonies called Pukamani, in which men and women sing and dance, and erect posts on the graves of the deceased.

Baskets called tunga are woven to hold the dead person’s possessions and payment for those taking part in the ceremony. Men and women adorn themselves with elaborate body decoration and wear specially designed armlets and other ornaments. The men dance holding carved and painted hardwood spears. The distinctive baskets are placed upside down on the grave poles.

This case displays some tunga baskets, a selection of ceremonial armlets for men and women, and some impressive multi-barbed spears.

Aboriginal barbed spears from the Tiwi Islands

Painting ancestral stories

Indigenous Australians often depict the great travelling paths of ancestral beings in their paintings. In the guise of humans, plants or animals, spiritual beings crossed the land, creating features such as hills and waterholes. Some of these ancestral journeys (or ‘Dreamings’) cover thousands of miles.

The places where the ancestors stopped or performed important deeds have great spiritual influence. Many of these sites and their associated stories are known only to men or only to women. This picture, Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters), depicts an important woman’s place near salt lakes in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia.

Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) painted by Anne Ngantiri Hogan, Tjaruwa Angelina Woods, Yarangka Elaine Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Ngalpingka Simms, Myrtle Pennington of the Tjuntjuntjara Community of Western Australia (2013) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The artists, all senior women of the Spinifex people, depict a story about ancestral beings that took place there. Seven sisters who are singing and dancing across the land are being pursued by a lustful man, Wati Nyiru. The women escape his unwanted attentions by launching themselves from a hill into the sky, where they become the Seven Sisters constellation. Here’s a schematic version of the painting explaining its various aspects.

The Spinifex people

A number of objects on display in the museum were made by the Spinifex people. Many of the Spinifex people were moved off their land when the British carried out atom bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. After a long struggle their claim for native title to the land was recognised by the Australian courts in 2000.

The Spinifex people Wikipedia article

Typical of their art is this painting made by senior men of the Spinifex people: Roy Underwood, Lennard Walker, Simon Hogan and Ian Rictor. It depicts an important songline (or ‘Dreaming’) relating to a place called Pukara and the travels of two ancestral men (Wati Kutjara) who travelled across the land, creating its features and customary law.

Pukara, collaborative painting by artists of Spinifex people (2013) from Tjuntjuntjara, Spinifex region of Western Australia © The Trustees of the British Museum

The museum provides another schematic explaining key elements in the painting.

Interestingly, artists from the Spinifex people, in the last 30 years, have taken to painting their stories and country in a for suitable for sale to outsiders i.e. they have engaged with the white art market, not only at home but abroad. The result is that you can now buy Spinifex art at galleries around the world. This particular painting was created by the community-based Spinifex Arts Project and bought by the British Museum in 2013.

Artistic innovation

Inspired by ancestral land and traditions, Indigenous Australians are bringing artistic innovation to ancestral traditions.

Sculptural objects made from plant fibres have long been part of Indigenous Australian culture. Historically, woven fibre baskets and sculptural forms were made for practical or ceremonial use but since the 1970s an increasing number of fibre works have been produced for the fine art market. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, women create woven sculptures of ancestral beings and animals.

In Pukatja (formerly Ernabella) in South Australia, Aboriginal artists use a wide range of materials and techniques. These include batik, a method of producing coloured designs on cloth, by brushing or stamping hot wax on the parts not to be dyed. The textile designs are inspired by ancestral landscapes, local plants and animals. The display case shows three sculptures of camp dogs and three batik textiles.

Women at Ernabella Arts in Pukatja, South Australia, began producing batik work after visiting Indonesia and seeing the technique being used there. The artists are inspired by the colours and forms of the ancestral landscape of the desert region where they live. Unlike some of the other paintings we’ve looked at, they don’t attach specific meanings to their designs i.e. they are purely decorative.

Torres Strait Islanders

The Torres Strait is the body of water which separates northern Australia from Papua New Guinea to the north. It is littered with a large number of medium-sized and small islands. Each of these was populated by Indigenous peoples, known collectively as the Torres Straits Islanders.

A map of the Torres Strait Islands showing the large number of tiny islands, by Kelisi (source: Wikipedia)

Although many islanders now live on the mainland they retain strong connections with their island homes. The sea, the sky and the land remain central to their identity and spirituality.

Before Christianity was introduced to the Torres Straits in 1871 the islanders held elaborate funerals involving masks and ceremonial dances. Often wearing turtle-shell masks, feathered head-dresses called dhari and pearl-shell chest pendants. Contemporary masks and head-dresses often incorporate new materials and forms but they are still inspired by ancestral beings and stories.

Thus the case displays a couple of traditional masks, a warup drum, dhari head-dress, stone-headed club and pearl-shell pendants. The Torres Strait drum known as the warup drum is shaped like an hourglass. This one is carved from solid dark wood. The larger end represents a fish’s head with open jaws. On the top is carved a lizard and along each side run two projecting bands ornamented with cassowary feathers and seeds. Feathers and goa nuts are attached to each side and incised decoration is infilled with white.

But it’s not just about old and traditional artefacts. The British Museum has bought, and displays, plenty of works by contemporary Indigenous Australian artists. This head-dress was made by contemporary artist Alick Tipoti.

Tipoti is from Badu Island in the Torres Strait. The name of this mask, Kaygasiw Usul, means ‘shovel-nose dust trail reflected in the heavens as the milky way’. It’s made from fibre-glass stained with polyester resin to create the transparent effect of turtle shell, along with plastic, nylon and superglue fastening more traditional materials.

The mask represents an ancestral shark, the Kaygasiw Usul, whose tail fin stirs up an underwater sand trail that forms the Milky Way. The small mask on top represent ancient dancers and the mask inside the mouth symbolises the main dancer.

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Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Tate Modern

Background

Two types of information