The National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition contextualises the artist away from the western market, bringing us ‘the old lady’ through the prism of her country, her culture and her community

A western story is invariably grafted on to Australia’s most prominent Indigenous visual artists – a reductive paradigm through which they can be more easily understood, interpreted and written about. And as a practitioner celebrated at the vanguard of the 1970s and 80s central desert art movement, “Emily” Kam Kngwarray (a whitefella first name, attributed to her in her teens) is perhaps the greatest example.

The simple version goes something like this. Kngwarray only learned to sign her name (“Emillly”) in the late 1970s, about the same time that she began expressing herself through visual art, after being introduced to the mediums of batik and tie-dye. Then, in the 1980s, she transitioned to the more commercial (for dealers at least) and aesthetically valued medium of acrylic on canvas – and her notoriety and saleability went stratospheric.

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