Life cycle I, II & III, 1994
Emily Kam Kngwarreye
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
91.0 x 61.0 cm (each)
91.0 x 183.0 cm (overall)
bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 94G013, 94G014 and 94G015
Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, Alice Springs, Northern Territory in July 1994
Chapman Gallery, Canberra
Private collection, Canberra, acquired from the above in September 1994
This work is accompanied by a copy of the certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery which states:
'To look on Emily Kngwarreye's work from an aerial viewpoint is necessary to understanding her perspective of her country. In her layered approach with colour, we see the sporadic clustered growth of plants in different stages of maturity. Understanding the life cycle of these plants is as vital to survival in the bush as is understanding the human life cycle and its needs.
On this canvas, the artist's choice of a rich yellow represents the most important plant in her custodianship, namely the "Anooralya", a hardy and fertile plant that provides both a tuber vegetable and a seed-bearing flower called "kame" - Emily's tribal name. Other colours reflect the time of the season when particular bush flowers flourish. These flowers contain seeds that are collected to make types of seed cake, damper, medicines and love potions. The presence of purple symbolises the 'ndorkwa', or bush plum, when plump and ripe enough to eat. The dots being placed in lines connect with the practice of anointing the body with lineal designs during ceremony, thus adding another dimension of celebration in the execution of this painting.
Ceremony reinforces through narrative, the significance of this knowledge. As well, it teaches basic social codes and obligations. Through her paintings, she serves to reinforce her knowledge amongst those who are to carry on after her.'
Emily Kam Kngwarreye was a strong woman, painting well into her ninth decade with extraordinary speed and confidence, in addition to fostering a consistent exhibition presence as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. In these twilight years of her life, she continued to paint sitting on the ground, in the same way she did to source and prepare food, tell dreaming stories with designs in the sand and apply body paint for the awelye women’s ceremonies over which Kngwarreye had presided as a community elder.
1994 was a year characterised by below-average rainfall and shortage of water across the country, keenly felt in the Simpson desert and across central Australia. Kngwarreye’s works were built on a foundation of deep botanical and ecological knowledge that she, and the Anmatyerr people, had refined over the local, lived experience of countless generations. Life cycle, I, II and III, 1994 with its audacious colour combinations of orange, blue, white and red, replicates the saturated hues of desert plants as they emerge from the muddy sand of Alhaker country, and the changes in colour as they ripen. Yellow represented the anwerlarr, the hardy yam plant with its seed-bearing kam flower, Kngwarreye’s namesake and the most important plant in the artist’s custodianship. The kam change colour, moving from white, then yellow, and then reddish brown as they age, inviting metaphorical comparisons with the three life stages of people—the white ones are ampa akely (babies), the yellow ones awenk (teenage girls), and the brown ones are arelh ampwa (old women).1 The luminescent blue/purple refers to nterkwe, the bush plum, and the vital presence of rain in stimulating the burgeoning of these plants. Alhalker country was Emily Kam Kngwarreye’s raison d’être and beyond celebrating the life-giving forces of nature, paintings such as this Life cycle triptych become metaphorical self-portraits and declarations of her people’s sovereignty over their ancestral lands.
The Anmatyerre have a culture that is visual and performative, and the visual designs of lines traces in the sand and painted on the body in awelye ceremonies found another form of expression in Kngwarreye’s fluid later works, with ‘her whole body moving and travelling with the brush as though dancing.’2 Stylistically distinct from the finely dotted clouds of her works from the early 1990s, Life cycle presents an immersive curtain of chains of large blotches, quickly worked with wet-on-wet paint, Kngwarreye’s paintbrush fluttering and skidding across the picture plane. To conserve energy, Kngwarreye adopted a new method of painting in 1992, pressing her paintbrush vertically on to the canvas, creating blooming florets of colour, capable of covering a large surface area when repeated in overlapping striations as in the Life cycle triptych. Responding to the urgency of her advancing years, Kngwarreye traded a loss of definition in her brushstrokes for a greater expressive quality and baroque exuberance. Expansive in its scale, Life cycle displays the nimble inventiveness of Kngwarreye’s mark making and the dynamism with which it was put to the service of expressing her ancient and enduring connection to country.
1. Perkins, H. and Cole, K., Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2023, p. 153
2. Isaacs, J., ‘Amatyerre Woman’ in Isaacs, J. (et al.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 21
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH