London’s Tate Modern presents the works of Emily Kam Kngwarray (1914–1996), an Anmatyerr-speaking woman from Alhalker Country in the Northern Territory of Australia. She was one of Aboriginal art’s early innovators and a global name of 20th-century painting, working on batik in the late seventies and eighties and later on canvas.
The first painting of the batik series, with its white forms, yellow dots, and patterns on a brown background, is Emu Dreaming. The border patterns represent the Anwerlarr (pencil yams), and within this frame, lizards, bush turkeys, insects, fan-flowers, and grasses. The Dreaming (Creation time) is fundamentally important for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Peoples and their social, cultural and spiritual practices. As noted on the exhibition info sheets, “Ancestral beings, popularly known as Dreamings, manifest themselves in Country and its many diverse life forms. Plants, animals, and natural phenomena, such as winds, fire and rain, travel across Country, shaping landscapes as they go. Important places and their Dreamings are celebrated in songs and ceremonies.”
Emily Kam Kngwarray painted her “Country”, an important concept in her tradition, combining landscape and the living ecosystems with their water holes, skies, animals, plants, and her people’s lives within these ecosystems, as well as the social and spiritual worlds. Untitled (Country and Emu walking) below shows the symbolic emu tracks and presumably a water hole and travelling paths across the country.
As regards deciphering the language of the paintings, dotted circles or concentric circles often represent people together, whether around a campfire or water hole, and dotted lines the paths taken by people or animals (see Australian Aboriginal Art Symbols & Their Meanings – Japingka Gallery, japingkaaboriginalart.com). Others are rivers, landscape features, sites of cultural and religious importance and host hidden private and often cultural-spiritual meanings, as the paintings work at multiple levels. Observe the painting below – Untitled (Alhalker) – and imagine the landscape, the paths people took from community to community across their country. Or are the lines depictions of ephemeral watercourses appearing and disappearing in this largely arid zone of central Australia? A painting, like a poem, can have layers of meaning, so what is there that we cannot ourselves see?
My Country 1993 also appears abstract, with its fields of orange and red and paler yellow on the centre-right. It is, however, a landscape of her home during a desert storm, with the pale yellow arguably being a sand cloud moving across the landscape. There are fewer clear dots and trails on the right of the painting, maybe showing how the sandstorm obscured (almost) all, at least for a while.
The yellow-dotted Nthang Altyerr (Seeds of Abundance)is worth standing in front of and beholding for a while. Gradually, forms emerge, depths develop, with the yellow dots in the foreground, the pinks behind, and after that, the greens, and at the back, the black. On the left, white dots are up front, and blue- and salmon-coloured dots are farther back. What may initially appear as a two-dimensional statement of abundance gains layer after layer of depth and possible meanings as our minds try to make sense of what Emily Kam Kngwarray has shared.
When first standing in front of Anwerlarr (Pencil Yam), it initially appears equally abstract as Nthang Altyerr, but gradually the pencil yam shapes emerge, looking like five-toed emu tracks. These shapes are clearly visible in the photo below, but from the painting, they only appear after a few seconds of looking.
The Pencil Yams (Anwelarr) are important for Emily Kam Kngwarray. Her name, Kam, is the name of the seedpods and encased seeds of the pencil yams. They change colours over their lifetime: first white, then yellow, and finally reddish-brown, and the transformation is linked to life stages, from children, teenagers, to older women. This is an additional key to decipher the paintings.
Anwelarr (My Story) is a rich, hypnotic painting, with many dozens of interconnected paths and thousands of dots, a landscape of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s life. It feels like looking at a rich part of the Milky Way and gradually discerning the constellations, each imbued with meaning.
Below is another painting titled Anwerlarr 1 (My Story), but this black and white was painted in 1995. It is almost an abstract, or selectively representative painting that could fit in any modern art gallery and be welcomed as part of a modernist tradition, even if it emerged from a very different socio-cultural context. But it is not abstract art, rather a type of connecting map that invites us to ask what all the paths and forms represent, where they lead to and what they connect. It is an invitation to wonder and explore.
I’d like to end with the Song of the Emu. Like the above-mentioned Abundance of Seeds (Nthang Altyerr), the more one looks, the more the painting transforms, acquires depth, and invites us in for a journey into the landscape.
At one level, it appears to be painted from the perspective of a high-flying bird. At another, it seems to be a horizontal landscape with a “vanishing point” a little right of the centre of the painting. A few moments more, and the blue dots made me think of water, and Monet’s water lily landscapes came to mind. I’m sure that had I spent longer there, more and more images would have emerged as the painting continued to transform in the mind’s eye. In writing this article, I recall the title – The Song of the Emu – an interpretation I completely missed and arguably shouldn’t have, given the cultural importance of the emu to Emily Kam Kngwarray and her people. The title and the artist’s intention raise an additional intriguing question: how to depict the song of a bird? The exhibition is a reminder – slow down and see, and while enjoying the wonder, take time to read too, but consider leaving the reading of the labels and information sheets until after a first (proper) look at the paintings.
The Tate Modern exhibition runs until 11 January 2026. See also Paul Daley’s insightful article on the 2023-4 exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, as well as the video and NGA audio learning tour on the NGA site that offers additional insight into Emily Kam Kngwarray, her people, her country and her creations. The NGA also houses the world’s largest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.
