Bajirru! there you all are, hello! From the Yanyuwa language of Balarinji’s origin community Borroloola NT
Jinangu awara wabarrangu barra kalu-wingka marnijinju wabudala kari-nguthundawabarrangu jinangu Australia li-wulu marnaji barra liyi-Yanyuwawu awara li-Marranbala li-Arrwangala li-Gudanji jinangu awara Burrulula marnaji yamulhu
Our Country we belong to is Borroloola. Yanyuwa, Marra, Gudanji and Garrawa people.We welcome everyone to this land Australia.
Yanyuwa elder Samuel Evans Jamika
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. are respectfully advised this website contains references, artworks and images of people who have passed
Qantas

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Art Aircraft

'Yam Dreaming’

1991
Synthetic polymer on canvas
230 x 150cm

Emily Kngwarreye’s name Kame means seed of the yam (Vigna sp.), or wild potato, and is an ancestral name which identifies the artist with her country Alhalkere. A piercing in her nose where the yam seed was carried, embodies her identification with her ancestor of the same name, Alhalkere. While the maze of lines represent the arterial roots of the yam growing beneath the ground, they also reflect a similar pattern of crazed lines above the ground, which indicates the maturity of the edible yam tuber. It is along these cracks that one digs to obtain the matured yam, a staple food source in the desert. The yam is also culturally very significant and in this painting the life force of nature and ancestral power is evoked. Over the summer of 1990-1991 Emily produced her first paintings on canvas. This style became her signature style.

Every painting of Emily’s contains reference to her multiple Dreamings

When asked what she paints she declared: “Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam), Arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), Atnwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot.”

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

(c.1910-1996)
Ancestral home, Alhalkere
Lived and worked at Utopia, Northern Territory
Anmatyerre language group
Photo Greg Weight. Courtesy of Qantas.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (PRON Emily Kummay N(g) (like “ng” in “ing”)-worray) was born in the early years of the Twentieth Century on her traditional country of Alhalkere (PRON Ull-hullkerra), a remote desert area around 230 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, near Utopia. A senior member of the Anmatyerre (PRON Un-muttcherry) clan, ceremonial leader and a custodian of Dreaming sites in Alhalkere, Kngwarreye was introduced to art late in life through a governmentfunded education program at Utopia and in 1978 became a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. She began painting on canvas in 1988 and over the next eight years quickly garnered attention for her remarkable body of work that embodied her deep spiritual and cultural connections to her Country and community.

Painting helped to keep her Dreaming alive and she produced more than 3,000 artworks over a short but intensive eight-year painting career.

A pioneer of the women’s art movement of the Central and Eastern deserts, Emily Kame Kngwarreye is recognised locally and internationally as one of Australia’s most important Indigenous artists. In 1992, Kngwarreye was awarded the prestigious Australian Artists Creative Fellowship and following her death in 1996 she posthumously represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale.

Her work was the subject of a major retrospective mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery and a second survey in 2008 toured Osaka, Tokyo and Canberra. Kngwarreye’s work is included in public, corporate and private collections.