Painting from Utopia
First Nations artist Emily Kam Kngwarray began painting in her 70s. Now, her work is being celebrated in a solo show at London’s Tate Modern. The Everywoman sits down with curator Kelli Cole to learn more.
By Divya Venkataraman
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are respectfully advised that this article contains records and online resources of photographs and names of deceased persons.
It takes a lot to get the Tate blockbuster treatment. Almost 30 years after her passing in 1996, it’s happening for Anmatyerr woman Emily Kam Kngwarray, who, after starting to paint much later in life, created thousands of canvases of superlative beauty. They all told tales of her Country, her ancestral lands of Alhalkere, Utopia, in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory; of pencil yams and emu footprints, of women’s ceremonies and red dirt hazing into an endless expanse of desert sky, blurring the separation between land and air.
Kngwarray first started expressing her artistic skill through batik printing, which is traditionally made with wax and silk, in the late ‘70s. She moved on to using paints and canvas in 1988 and only painted for eight years — but her work in such a short time made a significant impact. This exhibition of Kngwarray’s work first showed in a different iteration at the National Gallery of Australia, before coming to the Tate Modern in London. Warumunga and Luritja woman Kelli Cole, who co-curated the exhibition, has a personal connection to her work.
“I knew her as a kid, I watched her paint,” Cole tells The Everywoman. “I watched my uncle paint. I'm very lucky.” Cole’s uncle, the artist Robert Ambrose Cole, was deeply involved with the artists of the period and of the Territory. His partner, Rodney Gooch, was a well-known art dealer. Cole grew up in Alice Springs, where, she says, “we had amazing artists painting around us all the time.”
“Emily would be there with the other ladies. But she was the senior among them, she had the control of everything. And you could see that in her presence. She was an amazing, strong, vibrant person, with so much energy,” says Cole.
Gooch and Robert Ambrose Cole created a kind of safe haven for the women artists to paint when they were off their country in Utopia and in Alice Springs (which was a few hundred miles southwest). “When Emily would finish a painting and when [Gooch] would unroll it on the ground, and you would just look at it and go, ah.” She exhales, as if reenacting the moment of being in the presence of something larger. “It was amazing.”
Cole was surrounded by esteemed artworks her whole life, but Kngwarray, she says “had something that was just that little bit further than anybody else.”
“I think it was presence. Why did her work have so much presence? It was extraordinary.”
In a quote the lines the walls of the Tate where the Knwarray exhibition is displayed, some of her descendants offer their appraisals. “If you close your eyes and imagine the paintings in your mind’s eye, you will see them transform. They are real – what Kngwarray painted is alive and true,” suggest Jedda Kngwarray Purvis and Josie Petyarr Kngwarray. “The paintings are dynamic and keep on changing, and you can see how realistic they are … The Country transforms itself, and those paintings do as well. That’s why the old woman is famous.”
“If you close your eyes and imagine the paintings in your mind’s eye, you will see them transform. They are real – what Kngwarray painted is alive and true,”
For the last five years of Cole’s career, the focus has been on Kngwarray’s work, on retrieving its best, and finding ways to represent it faithfully in different environments. She worked with co-curator Hetti Perkins, of the Arrernte and Kalkadoon people, to learn about Kngwarray’s family, land and surviving descendants. “I’ve spent the last years of my life on her, and her community and her art, her country… and it's been an absolute privilege.”
That work cumulated in the exhibition, which opened in June — the start of summer in the northern hemisphere, the season galleries expect to welcome the biggest flow of visitors, and also, in Australia the start of NAIDOC week. It will remain there until January 2026.
The exhibition features around forty percent new works compared to what showed in the National Gallery of Australia in late 2023 to mid 2024. Partly, this is because of how widely collected her work is in Europe, from London to Switzerland. It opened up a whole new set of avenues to borrow pieces. A major Austrian gallery had six of her earlier works that Cole and the team, despite their lifelong association with Kngwarray’s work, had never known about before, she explains.
It illuminated different phases of her career that hadn’t previously been explored in as much depth with the pieces that were available in Australia. “We wanted the audience to see that not only was she a prolific artist,” says Cole, “but that she was such a clever artist in the way that she could change her styles throughout her career.”
Despite it all though, a throughline remains, constant and steady as the horizon that sometimes emerges in the background of Kngwarray’s works. “There’s a story that I was told,” says Cole. “Someone asked Emily, ‘Why do you think people love your paintings?’ And she says, ‘Well, I paint my country. My country is so beautiful. So people must think my country is beautiful because they want my paintings.’”
