Emily Kame Kngwarreye is a star amongst indigenous painters, even though her exhibiting career in old age spanned less than a decade, from 1988 until her death at the age of about 86 in 1996. She worked out of Utopia, and in downplaying the storytelling elements in her work, she helped pave the way to a more contemporary indigneous art form:

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ochre Body Paint 11, 1995, Earth Pigments and Natural Binder on canvas

The work of modern Aboriginal artists can no longer be dismissed as ethnographica. It is now rightly valued as a great art tradition that can be included as part of the 20th century's modernist abstract art. The abstract painterly quality of Emily Kame Kngwarreye's work has attracted widespread international interest and some of the works can take their place beside those of a Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky or Robert Motherwell.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye's work often has a structure of geometric forms that are over painted with lines of dots that overlap the contours of the outlines. Though the modernist art institution often exhibits these works along side of those of 20th century abstract European and American artists, Kngwarreye's works are not just vibrant compositions, exercises in avant garde form, or pleasing patterns and colours on canvas. The paintings are heavily layered or sedimented with indigneous tradition, history and religious ceremony.

Many of the works were produced in an Andy Warhol-like factory assembly line, in which various members of her family assisted in the painting, or painted works under her name which she did not touch. Somehow it was okay for Warhol to do this with his screen prints, but this strand of Kngwarreye's work is seen as fakes.

That is a problem for the investors. What we have are the vibrant works:

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Alatyite, Acrylic on canvas, 1994

She says:

I did batik at first, and then after doing that I learnt more and more and then I changed over to painting for good … Then it was canvas. I gave up whatsitsname, 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 - continually boiling and boiling the fabric, and lighting the fires, and using up soap powder, over and over, that's why I gave it up and changed over to canvas, it was easier. My eyes deteriorated, and because of that I gave up batik on silk - acrylic painting was better for me.

My own preference lies with the loose, bold and luscious blocks of monochromatic, linear colour of Emily Kngwarreye's Last Series:

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, "Last Series", acrylic on canvas, 1996

These fields of colour are recognizably an expressionist interpretation of the landscape from the perspective of the traditional indigenous cultural beliefs and customs. Yet, for all their modernist familarity, these works prompt in the viewer a way of perceiving the country and being in the landscape that are initially alien. We sense that we are stepping into a terra incognita of our visual culture.

The art life weblog asks: how do we non-aborigines make sense of this work? (see Thursday, April 15 2004). It's a good question. This post over at Artrift might help. us. Rilke is addressing his relationship to Cezanne:

For Rilke--and this is the heart of the transmittal from Cezanne--"reality" is a habit of the mind, a "tradition" deeper than all the other traditions, neither true nor false, but an anchor by which one holds fast against the new or the troubling.

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