Emily Kam Kngwarray

Barbara Kngwarray Long (Anmatyerr people):

Emily come to finish batik. They boil them [in] hot water, they clean them all white. They make dreaming, awely, awely one, batik.

Kelli Cole (Curator):

Kngwarray met Jennifer Green in 1976 at the old Utopia Station Homestead. The following year Green began work with the Utopia women establishing literacy, numeracy and textile dying classes. In late 1977, Suzanne Bryce and Pitinjara woman Kunytjitja Brown introduced batik to the women. In 1978 Julia Murray became the founding coordinator of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, with Kngwarray the most senior artist.

The outdoor batik ‘studio’ comprised rough shade shelters and open fires for melting wax and boiling fabric. The works were hung out to dry on bushes and fences. One of Kngwarray’s earliest batiks from Murray’s collection, has bold stripes that span the length of the cotton, like a literacy worksheet with cursive script. In the National Gallery’s untitled work on cotton created in 1981, the distinctive features of Kngwarray’s practice emerges with intersecting strokes, grids and roundels of various sizes. While the broader lines are the result of brushwork, the finely detailed dots encircled by lines were made using a canting or jutting to apply the wax.

This work maps the cultural meridians of Alhalker and neighbouring older ‘sibling’ country Anangker, employing the metaphor of the pencil yam and its seeds and seedpods. These are called 'Kam' Kngwarray's namesake.