Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c.1910-1996), who is one of Australia's leading painters, is from the Utopia community north east of Alice Springs, even though she started painting in the public arena when she was in her eighties. That painting was founded on decades of making art for private purposes, of drawing in the soft earth, of painting on people's bodies in ritual or, in the late 1970s, of painting on the bodies of the Utopia women.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Merne (Everything) (Australia, 1996)

The work can be placed within 20th century abstract art, and within this perspective her vibrant compositions are often interpreted as abstract colour-field paintings. What is offered here are explosive, yet ordered, rhythms energetically worked her canvas with fluid dots or blobs of colour that form pulsing layers over the 'mapped-out' underpinnings. She is seen as a contemporary artist, rather than an aboriginal one.

Wouldn't it be better if she is seen as an an innovator within the aboriginal tradition---one who produces work that is very expressive in a cultural rather than a personal a sense ?

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