Month: April 2024

Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition

Untitled, 1990, Emily Kam Kngwarray

A visit to view Emily Kam Kngwarray’s works at the National Gallery provoked much thought about how Western eyes view Aboriginal art. I freely admit that I have no training or understanding of how to view art, nor do I understand the desert culture from where the artwork originated.

Kngwarray was an eminent contemporary 20th century painter, whose work has paved the way for many other Indigenous women to engage in making art. Her career only spanned eight years but, in that time, she created a huge number of significant paintings and batiks which depict Dreamtime stories of which she was a custodian, and she also painted her Country around Utopia. Many of her paintings depict yam and emu dreaming, seasons and the contours of her land.

The sheer magnitude of her paintings amazed me. Her most famous one, titled ‘Earth’s Creation’, is 2.7m high and 6.3m wide. It takes up the length of a wall in the gallery. This painting is mesmerising and awe-inspiring. It fetched over $1,000 000 at an art auction in 2007. From my readings about her, what makes her unique and celebrated is not just the sheer size of her canvases but the range of different styles she employed as well as her layering technique using a cornucopia of colours, which is quite different to other Aboriginal art. Some art critics consider her to be on par with Monet, which begs the question why she has to be compared to a French male artist to establish her importance.

I couldn’t help wondering about this old woman who took up painting in later years. Besides the joy of painting and having her work exhibited in many countries, how did the work and fame benefit her and her community? How did she feel about having her work taken out of Utopia, stretched, mounted, and displayed in galleries where only the privileged can view them?

The artists would have produced these paintings with the canvas lying on the ground. Kngwarray may have kneeled on and maybe even walked upon her paintings. To reach the spaces in the center of the canvas, she would have touched them all over. Now, they are hung in a gallery with security guards ensuring that nobody comes anywhere near her works. How did she feel about this? Alienated? Are we viewing Aboriginal art, which most of us don’t really understand, how white people once viewed First Nations people as ‘noble savages’, curios there for our entertainment? I have no answers to my questions, only a sense of discomfiture as I view these pieces out of context.

I understand Kgnwarray’s importance as the first female painter to be recognised in an art movement that was dominated by men and the path she created for other women to follow in her footsteps. I can also see the significant benefit of recognising the value of First Nations artists and the great potential it offers to make a livelihood. And yet.

Perhaps one appeal of an exhibition like this one is the multitude of questions it raises for each of us to consider, regardless of the conclusions we may reach.

Flat packs

Instructions, screws and tools.

Moving house is detrimental to writing. In my spare time I have been carrying box after box up thirteen stairs, unpacking each of them, flattening the cardboard and taking that down to the stairs to the garage. At one point, I was wading through thigh deep cardboard to get to my letterbox.

The contents of the boxes all had to be distributed somewhere. I realised very quickly that my books would not fit in the number of shelves I had brought with me. A lovely large bookcase I wanted in the bedroom didn’t make it through the door and had to be manoeuvred back down. Another required four people to lift it over the balustrade to make it into the lounge room.

To avoid further such pitfalls, I joined the rest of today’s consumers and began to buy flatpack furniture. As there is only one of me, yet always two people indicated on the assembly instructions, it took me at least twice, if not thrice as long to get the job done. The items from the Swedish furniture giant were the easiest to assemble but didn’t always have all the bits needed. The assembly instructions from some of the smaller companies ranged from woeful to abysmal.

One set of shelves came with three screws to attach each shelf, but only two pre-drilled holes. That confused me for a while until I realised it was them and not me who had made the mistake. Left and right weren’t shown, yet required opposite pieces, holes were too large or too small to hold screws and the Allen keys provided were too short to do a complete turn.

My favourite piece, a rotating bookshelf, came with instructions in only Chinese. The pictures were miniscule and gave nothing away. Then, the QR code took me to a non-existent website, but I didn’t give up. The first set of shelves took me two and a half hours to put together, the second about an hour. Who would have ever thought that a battery drill would become a girl’s best friend?

I have finished putting all the pieces of furniture together now. I’m already beginning to forget some of the pain of crawling on the floor, trying to line up screws with pre-drilled holes, dropping Allen keys and losing my sanity, but not my dogged determination to get the job done. For now, the drill is resting in the dark recesses of a cupboard. Until next time…