Museums without Men

Here we see the remarkable, 22 piece, Alhalker Suite by Emily Kam Kngwarray. A work that responds to the ongoing cycles of the flood and rain season in the Sandover region, where Kngwarray was born.

Cutting through the onslaught of drought, Kngwarray illustrates for us the carpet of pink, orange, and green wildflowers that the rain brings with it. She shows us a ground transformed into a canvas of flora. Her work truly is a document of the heroic landscape.

Remarkably, Kngwarray was in her late 70s when she first began painting in acrylic. She had spent since the 1970s, when in her 60s, producing batik dyed fabrics - a painstaking, and physically demanding process which she described as having ‘bust her gut’. When she was introduced to acrylic paints, she found it less labour intensive and quicker to produce - and immediately wanted to explore it more. And that she did. From the age of 70 until her death 8 years later, Kngwarray painted every day, producing a total of 3,000 canvases.

For me, the Alhalker Suite is one of her greatest works, and one exciting aspect of it is that Kngwarray did not give the 22 canvases a specific order, so that every time this work is exhibited, it is displayed differently - with a completely new visual, and a powerful sense of unpredictability. 

In a way, it speaks to the nature of floods: the way flood water flows, and changes what the land looks like. Kngwarray manages to fuse the genres of landscape painting and self portraiture with remarkable dexterity. She wraps her personal and Community identities around the land and it really does feel like we are caught in the midst of her dynamic creation.