Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, Alice Springs, Northern Territory;

William Mora Galleries, Melbourne;

Applied Chemicals Collection, Melbourne;

Deutscher & Hackett, Australian and International Fine Art, Sydney, 29/11/2007, Lot no. 30;

Private collection, Sydney

Of My Country: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, The Applied Chemicals Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, 1 – 30 May 1999, and touring various venues throughout Victoria and New South Wales, June 1999 – April 2000

This painting bursts with joyous purples, yellows and pinks, so characteristic of Kngwarreye’s colourist paintings from the early 1990s. Stylistically the work retains the complex branching of underpainted lines indicative of the various levels of the yam, the tracks of the emu as it walks the country feeding on the yam, and the creator being. Kngwarreye is a highly celebrated artist and one of the most renowned Aboriginal female painters of the 20th century. Her contribution to Australia’s cultural heritage was recognised in 1992, the same year this work was painted, when she was awarded an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship.

Delmore Gallery, NT; William Mora Gallery, Melb; Applied chemicals collection, Melb; Deutscher & Hackett, Syd 2007; Private coll, Syd

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, Alice Springs, Northern Territory;

Private collection, Sydney

Kngwarreye is a highly celebrated artist and one of the most renowned Aboriginal female painters of the 20th century. Her contribution to Australia’s cultural heritage was recognised in 1992, the year after this work was painted, when she was awarded an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship.

Painted at Utopia in December 1989;

CAAMA – Rodney Gooch, Northern Territory;

The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Western Australia;

Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 30 June 1997, lot 49;

Private Collection, United States of America

In 1989 Emily Kame Kngwarreye produced her first paintings on canvas. At the time she was represented by the highly respected agent, Rodney Gooch at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). Rodney was one of the few agents to have worked with Emily throughout most of her career, and Anne Marie Brody acknowledges him as the source of Emily’s move to first paint on canvas with Emu Woman, 1988-89. In describing how unique and significant the artist’s oeuvre was, Anne Marie Brody states: “Photographs showing what other artists were producing, especially in 1989, the first year Utopia artists painted on canvas, are an instant reminder of just how much Emily Kame Kngwarreye stood out not only amongst her own Utopia crowd but right across the Western Desert.” 1 Artworks such as Awelye (meaning “my dreaming”) were among the first paintings on canvas to be produced by Emily. 

This seminal body of work set the foundation for her highly celebrated oeuvre in the years to follow. Awelye is a beautiful early reflection of Emily’s aesthetic where fluid configurations of dots and lines, representing seeds and growing yams, are rhythmically mapped across the canvas.

1. Anne Marie Brody, ‘Reflections on the Rodney Gooch Files,’ Indigenous Archives: The making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art, edited by Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean, UWP Publishing, 2017, p.46