Emily Kam Kngwarray and Utopia Art Centre

– Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for this special conversation to celebrate the opening of the Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition. My name is Georgia Close. I'm Head of Learning here at the National Gallery and I have the very great pleasure of introducing curators Hetti Perkins and Kelli Cole who will lead the conversation this afternoon. Before I pass to Hetti and Kelli, I'd like to note that we're joined by audiences online today at home as well as in the theatre. We will welcome your questions throughout the conversation using Slido which is our online Q&A platform. If you're joining us from home online, you can submit your questions via the viewing page. If you're in the theatre, please ensure that your phone is turned to silent and using the gallery's free wifi, you can head to slido.com and enter the code Kngwarray to submit your questions. You'll find the details on the screens on either side of the stage. Kelli, Hetti, thank you so much for leading the conversation today.

– Oh, there we go. Hello, thank you, Georgia. And hello everyone. Nice to see so many familiar faces, friends and family. And can we just begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this beautiful country where this exhibition is being presented. And of course, Jude Barlow for her wonderful welcome this morning and Dr. Matilda House and Paul House Girrawah for of course always being so welcoming and so gracious when we come to their beautiful country. We thought we would start this morning by introducing all of ourselves. I'm Hetti Perkins. I'm an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman from Central Australia.

– Hello, I'm from Alice Springs and my name is Louisa Long.

– Hello, my name is Margaret Long. I'm from Alice Springs and from area Utopia.

– Hello. [speaks in another language].

– I'll just interpret. Melissa's saying she's from Alhalker and Anangker country. I'm Jenny Green and I live in Melbourne at the moment, but I've spent a long time in the country which we’re about to talk about.

– Hello [speaks in another language].

– My name is Jedda and I'm from a country called Alhalker.

– I'm Josie Kunoth, Alhalker.

– [Jenny] I am Josie Kunoth and I'm from Alhalker.

– Hello, I'm Sophia Lunn and I've been living out Bush in Al Parra with all of these women for the last couple of years now. But I'm originally from Perth.

– My name Ki Kngwarray from Anangker.

– And I'm Kelli Cole, the other co-curator of this exhibition and I'm a Warumungu/Luritja woman and I'm curator of special projects here at the National Gallery of Australia.

– And particularly this very special project. I also should mention that Jenny, our co-editor of the catalogue and a very important collaborator on this exhibition and friends of the family is going to provide interpretation and translation for us today so thank you Jenny, for doing that work. We'd also like to, we're gonna hear a bit more about Utopia Art Centre in a moment, but I just wanted to really pay our respects and thanks to the Utopia Art Centre, the board, the staff, the managers who are here today, Sophia of course, and Georgie hiding up there. And of course, as I said, all the artists who are here and also in our audience for making this possible basically. Not supporting us, just actually enabling it to even happen. So we're really grateful. It's been, you know, it's, it can be a very challenging task, but we're really grateful for your support and that of Desart which is the peak body that represents Central Australian art centres. And they too have been, you know, critical in supporting this project as well as being, playing a very significant role in the establishment of Utopia Art Centre a few years ago now. Now I think I'll hand over to Kelli to introduce our film.

– So we thought will start with a film that is playing in the exhibition so that for those who have not seen it, we wanted to start here so you can see those big sweeping vistas of country. And also we did amazing women's camp with all of these ladies in March of this year. And again, that was another extension of our collaboration and finding out stories. The film was made with the footage from Tamarind Tree Pictures who've worked with us and spent quite a time with these ladies. Also, the beautiful visuals of the drones are also Dylan Rivers who is a Katege man. And that was cut together by our team here at the National Gallery Australia, Jed Cooper and Sam Cooper. So we'll start with that. Thank you.

– It's so wonderful to see the one aspect of the culmination of all this work by the community to this project and of course one part of this and the exhibition is another part and we're looking forward to the bigger picture, literally that Tamarind Tree will bring to our screens. So I think we might, unless anyone wanted to comment on that film, we might kinda go back a little bit to the beginning and I just wanted to ask Kelli to tell us a bit about, you know, your personal as well as professional journey to realising this exhibition.

– Thank you, Hetti Perkins. And thank you again to Tamarind Tree Pictures for this wonderful footage. It's really interesting when Hetti and I talk about when we first, you know, thought of doing a Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition, we can't quite remember the date and how long, but we've been working on this for many, many years and we've been working with the community probably for the last 18 months to two years. So obviously, you know, this is a wonderful exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray. We say it's like a living retrospective. Just like you see in that film, everything is still alive. The country is alive, the spirit within that country is alive, and these women represent that whole story. We've got in the exhibition, there's 92 works in the exhibition, but many of those works are considered one. If you even think about the Alhalker suite, there's 22 panels just in that work alone. And then of course we've got the amazing Summer Project which is on the outside of the exhibition in the foyer. So again, I recall meeting Jenny Green and giving her a call in Melbourne one day asking if she would meet me to work on this exhibition with Hetti and I, and the first question she asked me is well, what are you gonna do. And that was a good question because back then, this is like two and a half years ago even, I didn't, we didn't really know what we were gonna do, but what we did know was her collection is so vast and so amazing in institutions and in private collections and that was when Hetti and I spent the time try to work out what paintings and batiks and works on paper that we would include in this exhibition. So what we have here is a look in my personal connection or I should say our personal connection 'cause I've got my sister, Dennial McLean here tonight who today who's a part of Tamarind Tree Pictures. And I've also got my beautiful family, my son's in the front row. Our connection is a personal connection. My uncle Robert Ambrose Cole was a very well-known artist and he was in, married to Rodney Gooch and Rodney Gooch worked with the ladies to batik to begin with and then with painting. But I met Kngwarray quite a few times when I was younger. I knew that I was around surrounded by greatness. But at that point I was, you know, that's back in '89, '90. I wasn't, you know, there was this lot of beautiful women painting. So I've got these fond memories of going out to Utopia when I was about 16, 17 years old and then always going to my uncle's house and watching the ladies paint there. And we're not just talking about Emily Kam Kngwarray. We're talking about Gloria Pajata, Ada Bird, all of these ladies' family. So yeah, so putting that exhibition, working with, you know, institutions and lenders.

– And from what you've said, Kelli, going to the house and seeing all the ladies sitting down together painting which reminds us of how you described the batik process too, Jenny, and we'll see some photos of that, we'll talk about that soon. But it strikes me that that was a bit like a, what is a modern day art centre before they kind of, well they, some had been invented by then, but they wasn't such a feature of the, of our cultural landscape as it is today. Sophia, do you wanna tell us a bit about art centre life and also if the ladies feel like telling us about what happens there? We've had the privilege of visiting you at that beautiful art centre and having cups of tea looking at paintings.

– Hello. So yeah, I've been out at the art centre for three and a half on four years now which has been the honour and privilege of my life to come and spend time with these ladies and get to know them, learn some language. I have the best teachers and guides that there is. But obviously as these ladies have said, the art movement started out there long ago and there have been many really key and integral people that have come and spent a life's work out there working with these amazing women building careers and building connections which is fantastic. So it's really great that through a long period of consultation, about two years with Desart, the peak body for Central desert art centres, it was approached to the community what they wanted, how they wanted their art story represented. And it was through an art centre model to put, you know, the voices of the people that speak their own language and culture for themselves. So it's been really magical to be part of that process and have kind of a central hub within the homelands for projects like this to exist which has been really, really special. Yeah, so we did a lot of the consultation in the art centre, but also driving troopies full of people and big water tanks and lots of Koran mana out to the desert to do big camps and which we'll touch on the slide just before doing some amazing trips over to Perth to see the Holmes a Court collection which was unreal. And then, yeah, many, many, many country trips with the ladies and the curators which was magic. Louisa?

– Before, while you're thinking about talking about Perth maybe, the, could you just tell us the art centre? So it's an, it's Aboriginal owned.

– Absolutely, so it's, yeah, we have a Indigenous board of local people from a collection of the homelands. We have over 100 artists so these ladies that are represented here in this swathe of country that's represented is only one part of the Utopia Sandover region. So it's actually 16 homelands and we'll see a map later on just to get a sense of how vast it is. Lots of those countries and stories are interconnected by family and cultural lines. So you'll see too from the map how much Emily herself travelled and where places that she lived and stayed with various family in different spots around. And yeah, we are not-for-profit federal government funding which is really great through IVS so shout out to them and their hard work, but yeah, yeah.

– Thank you, Sophie. What was it like, we saw before, when you're looking at that beautiful batik, what was it like for you because I imagine sometimes you've seen these works made and then they leave and go to someone's house or someone gallery and you don't necessarily see them again. Was it, what, how did you feel about going to Perth, travelling there, and looking at all these paintings and batiks?

– [speaks in another language] So we went to Perth and we saw all the silk batiks that our grandmother, our whose name was Kam as well as all the other batiks that had been made by the women from her family. And that batik making process went back a long time to the time when I was working there and we'll talk more about that later.

– So on our Perth trip, it was really beautiful because we had access to the Janet Holmes a Court collection and as you can see behind the images, you see all these wonderful, you can pull out the screens in all of these paintings so we looked at the batiks first and then we started looking at the paintings. And again, there was a summer project in the left-hand corner. I don't know if that changes for you guys, but there's Jedda with her work. And is that Judy with her work as well, Judy. And they, we also, anyone wanna talk about singing and singing those paintings and how you felt when you saw that old lady's paintings there? Josie.

– [speaks in another language] That was the first time that we went to Perth and we saw the old woman's silk batiks. It made us feel in our bodies really sad and we cried and it was like it was just like her. It was like her, it's like she was there, and it made our bodies feel very emotional to see those batiks.

– That's beautiful. As you can see here, we've, we were looking at all of the part of the process. Kelli, maybe you could talk a bit about just that showing the pictures and some of the paintings and doing your, with the catalogue for instance, how the process around that.

– Yeah, so like a lot of people talk about consultation, we talk about collaboration because we say that this exhibition could not have been done without these women. And so Hetti and I and Jenny went to Utopia quite a few times, again with Tamarind Tree Pictures, and every addition or every of the catalogue so every painting that we selected, we showed it to the ladies. So we would pull out these big photographs of the paintings and there, that's how we found these real true stories of what were in these paintings 'cause these ladies could see what that old lady was painting and they were telling us, revealing those stories to us which was extraordinary. So here's a photo of me, you know, with not Naomi. Who I got there, Dishani, and you know, the younger generation got involved in this. So again, I'm sitting there with a catalogue flipping out the pages showing what painting's gonna be in there. But what's really important for us is when we were selecting portraits of Kngwarray to put in our catalogue, we wanted to have really beautiful, respectful ones, the ones that she would wanna see, you know, be happy to see. And these ladies also helped us select these beautiful portraits and then also awely shots. There's a lot of ladies painted up in not just these modern day, not these contemporary photos and photos that we have today, but of when Kngwarray and some of the older ladies who have passed painted up in awely, we wanted to make sure that they were right, that we could put them in and that every family member said yes to all of those works being in there. So this is being signed off 100%. This is community involvement and it's their, you know, catalogue and their exhibition as well.

– Thanks, Kelli. We will just conscious of the time. We've got the, we, it was mentioned before, Sophia, you talked about the breadth of Kngwarray's country and all the ladies' country here. And we were really fortunate that Jenny suggested that we commission a map from wonderful Brenda Thornley who's made this amazing map so that we can understand a little bit better this beautiful country. Jenny, can you talk about your experience of well, being on country, but also how it all connects, I guess.

– Yeah, yeah, well, I think it's really, I like maps, lots of different sorts of maps.

– I've noticed, yeah.

– And I think it's just one way of looking at things. We can think of this sort of map as one way of looking at things. So I hope you can all see it well enough, but if you can't, you will see it in the front of the exhibition and looks really beautiful I think on that wall. So thanks to Brenda Thornley. So Kngwarray's life world was centred around some of many of the places named on this map. She was born at Alhalker around 1914. And Alhalker's in that yellow triangle just on the edge of the green bit. So you can look more closely at the map when you have time. A place called Angutin which is in the Sandover River was where she first saw a white fellow and she thought that white fellow was [speaks in another language] which is the Anmatyerr word for monster and she and her cousin I think were frightened and they ran away. There's another place on the map called which is west, almost halfway to Ti Tree. And that's where Kngwarray tells a story about running away from a policeman who was, who had arrested her and she escaped and ran all the way back to Alhalker country so Kngwarray also lived and worked on some of the station properties in this area. She talks about looking after sheep and nanny goats, about smashing up ant bed which was termite mound which was used to make a sort of cement like substance to build houses and make floors and so on. She looked after the kids of station owners and did lots of other jobs. The map also shows you free held title land. That's the green parts which are the result of successful land claims over the areas of that country so that's the freehold area. And it also shows the 16 or so homeland communities where many of these artists continue to live.

– Thanks, Jenny. Is it possible just to, well, you mentioned land claims, could you just talk a little bit about the role of people in giving evidence at those land claims, like the cultural that it's part of testimony, isn't it in a whitefella legal sense?

– Yes, well these areas that were claimed, they were claimed under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act. And the process of claiming country involves a lot of research by anthropologists, linguists. And then people, the family groups get together and talk in front of the land commissioner, the judge, and they talk about their family connections to each other and to the country. They talk about the places on the country, the different named places that are really important, mountains, rivers, and often people do ceremonies too for the judge to show how connected they are to the place.

– Anybody wanna talk for this map or no? Okay, next one, yeah. Okay, here's, again, we were talking about the wonderful images that we were able to source with the support again of Jenny and the community. And we're going right back to the beginnings of the batik movement here of course. Jenny, I think you might have to start by telling us about that and then we'll ask the ladies about that time.

– Yeah, so one of the things I was gonna say, this exhibition and the publication that accompanies it sourced a lot of archival images from people who are very generous in sharing what they had. And these might've been including many photos of Utopia in the old days. And on this slide you can see a photo of Emily Kam Kngwarray and Lily Kngwarray making tie dye at Angorupa, the homestead at Utopia, and also another photo of the old woman making batik. And the opening slide we had showed a beautiful photo of Kngwarray on the way to the first batik exhibition in Alice Springs in Mparntwe in 1980. And that photo was taken by Toly Sawenko who I think was the schoolteacher for some of the women here way back. So it's been very important to source these things to enrich the exhibition and to also talk with community and enrich the archives themselves by really making sure that all the people in photos are named properly. They're named properly, we don't leave people out, and in turn we feed this information back to the archives so that this can be kept for the future.

– Yeah, keep, let's ladies can, if they wanna say anything, let us know.

– Say anything about these photos? Maybe we'll talk about batik on the next slide. But I suppose another thing that happened that from the archives was also sourcing and recordings of Kngwarray talking and singing. And that was a very, another important layer of the information that is part of this exhibition, the film and the conversations about ongoing traditions and also the, what's been seen very clearly at the opening of the exhibition and in the film and so on is the way people are carrying on those, the legacy of the old woman and the rest of her family.

– And so in this image we have Julia Murray. It's in one of the shots here, the one on the left-hand side. What was it, I mean obviously one of the things that strikes me is in the catalogue we have a image of all the ladies going I think it was to Adelaide for an exhibition. So quite different, you know, quite a different way of presenting the exhibition to presenting one at the National Gallery of Australia. How did you fund and how did you sort of organise those exhibitions back in those days?

– Sold hot dogs.

– Hot dogs. We didn't think of doing that. Should have had hot dogs at the cafe. So it would've been, was there, you know, with the, like there was literacy and numeracy and driving classes and things like that. With, yeah, I'm just trying to sort of picture it with little or no support. So what was that like, what was the sort of feeling like amongst the community and the ladies doing these new projects?

– Well, I think it was very exciting. I'll just, maybe I'll just briefly mention a few key points in the history of that process. So the first activity that the women joined in was making tie dye and wood block printing as you saw in the first slide or the previous slide and that was in 1977. And then we all learned batik together and we were taught by Suzanne Bryce and a Pitjantjara woman called Kuntjitji Brown or Yipatee who was from Fregon. And had, she had learned batik at Ernabella in a batik workshop that had been there for several years, many years in fact. So then in 1978, Julia Murray who's pictured making batik on this slide along with Violet Petyarr who's in the front and Violet's also in the film you just saw. So Julia managed to by some miracle to get some really more secure funding in '78 and she was the founding coordinator of the Utopia Women's Batik Group so she kept it going after that initial learning time and so on. In this slide you can also see the tools. One of the tools that's used or you can see the tjanting which is the little metal copper pipe that's used to direct the wax onto the fabric. And in the lower two parts of the slide, you can see Kngwarray and another Kngwarray putting the waxed fabric in the dye and then hanging it out to dry on the bushes which might be [speaks in another language] but maybe at this point we should go back to the homestead photo where Julia and Violet are doing batik. No, no. Next slide.

– Oh sorry.

– Sorry. Do any of you want to talk about that? Do you wanna talk? Where were you that time, Jedda? The school...

– [speaking in another language]

– So Jedda's saying that they really enjoyed watching Kngwarray, old woman Kngwarray making the batik and they, after school they would go and watch the women making batik. And just for a bit of context, if you went to the, your left of that photo, there's a big silver caravan which was the Utopia school in those days. So the batik activities happened close up to the old school.

– [speaks in another language] I used to watch the women like Barbara and Rosemary and Nora Petyarr making batiks, making the silk one. They would wax the fabric and then put it in different coloured dyes. There were, you know, yellow ones and white and purple, red and after that they'd boil the wax out of the fabric. That's what I used to see happening.

– And I think Josie this morning was saying it was hard work, that that old lady was really a hard worker for that when we were in the galleries there. So Jenny, when, why did Kngwarray decide to transition to painting with acrylics on canvas?

– Well that's a big question. I think there was one particular time when she said to me very clearly that she explained what hard work batik is and I think if you can imagine even as being talked about today, the amount of work that's involved in collecting the firewood to and the water to boil the fabric, there's a lot of physical work and I think in fact the processes and the dyes and all these things, it's very, it's sort of quite intense and complex. I think Kngwarray famously, perhaps famously said that she got a bit sick of batik. It was too much hard work and she didn't like the amount of Rinso that it took to wash the wax out of the fabric.

– [Hetti] A waste of Rinso, that's a good reason to give up.

– Hetti loves that.

– She changed over to painting because we are wasting too much Rinso. I'm sure there's a lot of other reasons people could think about why painting became the main thing people were doing. It's a complex question. We might come back to it later.

– Yes.

– And I was thinking it was the eyesight was another, wasn't it that, did she say that her eyesight was a bit deteriorating or something and she found the acrylics a bit easier?

– Yeah, she might've mentioned that, yeah.

– Okay, we might have a look at these. Kelli, I might ask you to tell us about these two wonderful works. One from the collection of the gallery of course and then one from a significant private collection.

– Well, look it was really important to start with, you know, to include batik obviously in the exhibition. Like we said, she did 11 years in batik prior to even painting on canvas and we've got, you know, three different stages of batiks hanging in the exhibition and in our first room, we start with these wonderful two works here, one to the, the green one, I'm terrible with my left and right and this is reversed here so. Same for me.

– Oh okay. So the one on the left, the green one, I talked about this in our talk before. This is a work that Julia Murray has loaned the gallery for this exhibition. It's one of the earlier batiks she worked on I believe. It's a work on cotton. I'm looking at, you know, to be corrected at any point here by Jenny Green. So look, it's a wonderful work, it's a very small work, but it's a work on cotton. It doesn't have that luminosity of works on silk. But it's important in the sense of this is one of the works that she first made. We, you know, talked about the, I'll stop saying we talked about, I'll just pretending you've all heard this for the first time. So, you know the early workshops they did with numeracy and literacy and Kngwarray learning how to write her beautiful script so a hand across a paper learning to write. You can sort of, when we saw this, it's that sort of beautiful repetition. It's also like Kngwarray's first script across a beautiful cotton batik. Hetti's asked me the personal connection to this other work. The work is a National Gallery of Australia batik. It's one of the first works we got in our collection of Kngwarray. It is a really important work for us. I don't know if you know this, but because they're on textiles, when you've got works on paper and works on textiles, you can't actually display them for very long periods of time 'cause they fade and deteriorate with the light. So this gorgeous work entitled, "no titled 1981" has actually travelled quite significantly to our international exhibitions. And actually the last one I was Everpresent which was curated by my wonderful colleague Tina Baum who's here today who's a Larrakia woman and Tina took this gorgeous work to, it was a, in Auckland as well and so it's a very significant work for us. You can also see, you know, it's her first time she's actually creating those beautiful linear works. There's also a work in, you know, back to personal connection, there's also a work in the exhibition from Jenny Green's, has been donated by Jenny Green's family. And I think Jenny Green or Hetti's gonna ask this question. No, Jenny, do you mind if I ask you the story about your mum's works that you've, there's a funny story about a batik that was made and you gave to your mum.

– Oh yes, quickly. I think one of the things about the early batik days is we were making batik on not, we were making batik T-shirts. When we were gifted some sewing machines, we made cotton shirts and made batik on those as well as the cotton and silk lengths. My mother was the recipient of a shirt that Kam Kngwarray batiked on a very early one that she wore for a while. And then it, you know, the trouble with these fabrics and the clothing items is that they're very, they don't, they sort of, they're, that they wear out. But fortunately some of these things have survived. And my mum's shirt is now in the NGV collection. She did wear it in the garden because it wasn't my sewing that I made the shirt wasn't really, it was, I'm not a very good sewer of shirts perhaps. But you know, there's also other things in that in the NGV that, things I, I mean in those days we would make batiks into trousers and I know that perhaps I regret it now, but there was a beautiful batik that Kngwarray made that I stitched into a pair of trousers that I wore for quite a long time. And that's in the NGV collection. So I think batiks had a very stressful life perhaps because they are fragile and we now, the conservators are now saying we can't have them in exhibitions for very long because of the destructiveness of the light. So we are very lucky to see them and we, I think maybe this exhibition might stimulate people to bring out their batiks too. And there might be some more treasures from those times in the '70s or '80s, that '70s and '80s that can be accessed by the public. Gifted

– Yes. And gifted to the NGA. Yes, it's been wonderful. We were so delighted when Jenny suggested that there might be an early work that Julia had in her possession. And as you can see, it's very exciting to have this in the show so thank you for that suggestion. I think I am conscious that we are running out of time so we may not get through our last slides, but I'm just gonna say that the catalogue is amazing and I can say that because I barely did anything to contribute to it. So all credit going to the ladies and to Jenny, but you know, this is such a rich source of information. But I think we should now just talk about particularly about anwerlarr which I'm conscious my pronunciations are all out of wack. Can, who would like to tell us what we're looking at here on the screen?

– [speaks in another language] So this is anwerlarr, the plant that Kam Kngwarray painted. You can see the white, the little white pod there is the kam seed that Kngwarray Kam was named after. And on the right-hand side you can see the roots of anwerlarr which is called sometimes in English pencil yam the roots that are the edible part of the plant. So this is the plant that Emily Kam Kngwarray was named after.

– Is there a story about you've got for digging up that one with the old lady?

– [speaks in another language] So remember the old woman, Kam and other people used to dig up the root of the plant and take it back to camp to cook. This plant, the anwerlarr originated from the very important country from the big place. Alhalker.

– Could you just elaborate a bit on the importance of that, the originating from the place? I'm not yet, you or anyone if, what that mean.

– The, I use that as, originate as a translation for an Anmatyerr word which it's one of those words that is very hard to translate to do it justice, but the general principle is of originating being created in a place. It's a word that's used to talk about the dreamings that emanate from country. So this is the ongoing process of originating and being ever present.

– Thank you, I think you can feel that in the paintings really when you look at them. Do, we only have time for maybe one more or two more slides. Is there something people wanna talk about?

– [speaks in another language] So in this slide is intekw which is the fan flower and katyerr which is a desert raisin and a grass called alyatwereng which is a woollybutt grass. What Bijara said is all of these plants originated in the country and she also said that the alyatwereng seed from the alyatwereng, the woollybutt grass is collected and ground up and then cooked and eaten.

– [speaks in another language] Okay, so intekw, the fruit, you can see the bright yellow, slightly hairy fruit, that's a fruit that emus eat and sometimes people. Sometimes people eat it.

– [speaks in another language] So that intekw, the fan flower, old lady Kam Kngwarray painted that as well. And in some of the canvases and perhaps the batiks that are hanging in the exhibition, you can see those as well as the anwerlarr, the pencil yam that she painted.

– That's wonderful. Thank you so much. We have come to a point where we would, some of the people listening and watching want to ask some questions to finish today. But we might answer those questions while we look at this beautiful work which details where, how these plants we've just looked at influence and appear in Kngwarray's work. So one of the questions that people would like to know is that Emily Kam Kngwarray's work, art is loved by people all over the world. How does it feel for you as family to see her, you know, acknowledged, to see people repay that respect in that way? How does it make you feel that she's famous?

– [speaks in another language] It makes ourselves, our bodies, our beings feel really happy and strong to see all these artworks by our grandmother.

– And I think I might extend that question. I think it suggests that, I know that when you singing and doing things, you've been listening to those old songs, lady singing and is that makes you feel happy and more proud too?

– [speaks in another language] When we listen to the old woman's songs, her awely, her women's ceremony songs, it's like it's really real and it's like she's there and it makes us all feel very happy.

– I was just gonna add when on Wednesday when the ladies actually, the ladies arrived on Wednesday, but on Thursday we did a private viewing for the ladies to have a look at the exhibition by themselves. And you know, there was a lot of happy, you were really happy. You walked in all the rooms and looked at them and you know, it was a really beautiful emotional time for all of us. So I can attest to how happy they were when they saw the old lady's works.

– Any other, you have another question? It's okay. People were asking about how Kam painted using brushes or fingers, how that, talk, maybe talk about some of that change, the way that she would paint maybe from body paint to canvas. Is that something that people would like to talk about?

– [speaks in another language] Kngwarray in her batik work, she painted arlewatyerr, women's ceremonial designs and then she thought she would change over to canvas and she also used those arlewatyerr ceremonial designs in the canvas as well, the emu and the anwerlarr pencil yam dreamings. So we saw those anwerlarr designs revealed in the batiks and in the canvas.

– [speaks in another language] So we saw her painting and singing awely at Three Boors which is on the map. Women were painting up their thighs and their breasts with awely designs. They were sitting behind a windbreak. So there weren't any houses at that time and she said to everybody, to the grandchildren, you have to take on, you have to take on and look after this ceremony.

– Well, that's, thank you for sharing that story. That's very special. I think we have one, time for one more question and it seems appropriate to ask what's next for Utopia Art Centre, and art centre and artists of course, things that you are excited about that might be coming up.

– So firstly, we're very excited we're getting a building which is great after four years. Windbreak, we're actually gonna go visit the building on our way home. So it's gonna be very exciting. It's in the yard being built. But all of these ladies are incredible painters in their own right and their work has been exhibited before and will be exhibited again. We have a website where you can purchase their work as well. But most excitingly, we have had a really great pleasure working on this project and being here in Canberra and very excitingly the exhibition. The next iteration will be at Tate in the UK so we're getting excited about maybe going over there with these women and perhaps others would be fantastic to be there.

– This is no more [speaks in another language] that old lady from that side, the queen, but still we'd still go and see her country, that other odd lady, but I think I've just, hand over to Kelli now to say something and say thank you.

– I look at you like I was gonna say something. So when Sophia's talking about the Emily Kam Kngwarray is going to the Tate, I think the date was July 2025 so we are very excited. We only found out that this week. Yeah. So we’re all going over. Look, I just wanna thank you all for coming. We didn't get to the paintings, but that's okay 'cause you can see the paintings in the exhibition like I said. Also the exhibition publication we have has got extraordinary texts by, you know, Dr. Jenny Green, Hetti Perkins and myself... Stephen Gilchrist and also Chrishona Smit. But I just would like to thank you all for coming today and I hope you enjoyed it and thank you, the women. Oh, oh, special thing that we're, just to add more to our workload, the women wanna sign catalogues so if anyone would like to buy a catalogue at the shop, the ladies are gonna go down there and sign the catalogue for you so that's very, what a privilege. Thank you all.

– Join us in thanking the ladies please.