Emily Kam Kngwarray’s visions of the desert

Kngwarray was born around 1914 (this was before record-keeping in the Northern desert). An Anmatyerr woman living in the Sandover region north of Alice Springs, she could remember seeing a white person for the first time as a young girl. When settlers took over the Indigenous lands, she worked on their cattle stations. Eventually, in her sixties, Kngwarray started making art. At first she worked with batik, that intractable wax-based medium that yields such clodhopping results for most of us. Silk banners, floating from the ceiling, carry the hot reds and burnt ochres of her country, twined through with plant tendrils and glimpses of starry nights and ghostly footprints in the sands. In Kngwarray’s hands, batik becomes as delicate as watercolour.

But then come her first paintings on canvas, from the 1980s, as dense with dots as a pointillist Seurat. Stand as far away as possible in these huge galleries and you can just make out the tiny creatures skittering through the tangle of buzzing marks in the early works. Much closer, and they start to disappear. What is above, and what below, becomes a compelling question. There are presentiments of blazing heat, baked clay, the orange and oxide red of the desert. Droves of dots aim in one direction, as if wandering, or purposefully walking; others gather like they’re seeking shelter. In later galleries, there are sheaves of lines on enormous multipart canvases that appear purely abstract, or loop and trace like the non-stop strokes of the New York painter Brice Marden. The physicality is intense: each canvas pullulates with energy.

There is no way that these paintings can have the same meaning for a First Nation Australian and a western viewer, despite the eloquent wall texts explaining Dreaming (at the centre of Aboriginal spiritual belief), mythology and the inter-relationship of human beings and land. Kngwarray was a custodian of her ancestral country, who never left her community despite national fame and the admiring attentions of the Australian government. To some extent, her paintings are a ritual honouring of the land.

But although they run as wide as a Jackson Pollock (who also worked on the ground) or as tall as a Mark Rothko, with their floating glow and smoke, these paintings are anything but abstract. Kngwarray’s art is ebulliently figurative. The daft footprints of a young emu go in all directions like crazy arrows. An older emu slows down and limps. Women dream of rising trees, or the spirit of the land, a silvery figure shifting through the image.

In Ntang Altyerr (Seeds of Abundance), from 1990, the greening of the land emerges through a sparkling burst of ochre and yellow seeds that spring into life in an exuberant haze.

Kngwarray had different idioms, not all of them equally potent. Her stripe paintings appear so coded as to be closer to ritual, and although the colossal multipanel paintings look as if they were made to be shown in a white cube gallery, their evocation of the boundless world is curiously weakened over such a scale.

A tiny tear in an early batik, incidentally, where the artist pegged it to a cattle fence to dry, reflects the actual conditions of their making.

But as the years pass, Kngwarray’s art grows more glorious, until you reach the final song of a gallery. Named after the pencil yam, from which the artist also took her name, the Kam Room is on fire: canvas after fizzing canvas of dancing roots and whirling vines, lemon, orange and pink against thrumming black backgrounds. It is amazing to think that these visions could have such monumental expression at the hand of an artist in her eighties: dizzying, joyous and majestic.

Emily Kam Kngwarray runs at the Tate Modern, London SE1, until 11 January 2026

Photographs courtesy of Emily Kam Kngwarray