Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Indigenous Knowledge – Painting as Mapping and Archive Tate Modern

What can you paint at the end of your life? How does painting feature in a Aboriginal culture? Does contemporary art culture intersect with Aboriginal art – should we even look for this kind of connection? How did exhibitions of the great painter and artist of the Northern Territory explose her work and contextualise it? How do exhibitions in contemporary museums welcome aboriginal art? 

Exhibition Chinwag is the original segment of the podcast where Joana invites professionals from other fields to visit and discuss the work of artists through their solo exhibitions. 

Guest: Emily Harding the OG Exhibitionistas co-host!

Surprise Guest: John McDonald, Art Critic.

John's Substack.

The artist: Emily Kam Kgnwarray at Tate Modern until 11 January, curated by Kelli Cole.

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Key themes: 

Painting; children in art; painting the body; the representation of the body, Jenny Saville

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hello exhibitionistas, welcome to another episode of the podcast with me, your host, Joanna Pierre Nevis. Today we have the OG format of exhibitionists. So if you're new here or if you've been distracted, we have segments now, so we have different types of episodes in this podcast. But we started the first season with one single format that is now called Exhibition Chinwag, and it was a very simple formula that was incredibly satisfying to record, and apparently you enjoyed as well. Which is me, the dusty specialist, inviting a guest who doesn't work in the industry and who discusses an exhibition with me. Emily Harding was my co-host, she was the non-art specialist, the exhibition goer, as she called herself, during the whole of the first season. So today is the OG format, but I would say that today is the OG of the OG because my guest is precisely the one and only Emily Harding, back by popular demand, and this time we visited the exhibition together. Why visit the exhibition separately? So now is the time to tell you what exhibition we are going to talk about. If you haven't read the title of the episode, it can happen. Sometimes you're playing a podcast episode, then another one follows, and you don't know. So we are going to talk about Emily Kame Nare, who is or was, she passed away in 1996, an Aboriginal artist. And for that reason, precisely, I decided to invite someone from Dan Under, John MacDonald, an art critic from Australia, hopped into the episode and contributed with his side of the story. Because I'm I don't know John. We've never met in person, we've never talked beyond or before the episode. But I read a text of his on Substack, and it was the first article. I was investigating this episode, and it was the first article where I learned something beyond what everyone says about Emily Nare. For example, uh one of the first things that John says in his article is that he knows from a pretty reliable source that the spelling of Emily Kamenare's name was changed by linguists against the wishes of Emily Kamenare. And he makes an interesting point, which is can you imagine if you decided to spell Agnes Martin by replacing the I with a Y? You would not do that, but because she is from a very specific community, because she is not white, because she doesn't have power, that was changed against her will. The idea of this episode is precisely to empower you, my dear dear dear listener, and also ourselves, art professionals, and my guests, to enjoy exhibitions regardless of what we know about the artist, what we know about the exhibition, and also to then reevaluate the experience through the knowledge acquired across the episode. The knowledge is not to shatter the first impression, it is just an additional form of relating to the work, sometimes expanding the satisfaction and other times providing an insight into certain issues regarding curating, for example, or institutional conditions of programming, for instance. The more you know, the more you enjoy. And also, um, if you lose a tiny bit of your innocence, I think you acquire something else, which is the expansion and the solidity of your experience. But it will always be a personal relation with whatever you know. In this episode, we are really going to be faced with that reality because the three of us have very different relationships with this exhibition and with the artists. So it was really interesting to listen to John, and you can also check his page. Um, he has a really interesting and very, very thought-provoking Substack page called, and I am checking as I am talking to you, everything the art world doesn't want you to know. Another thing I wanted to tell you is for you artists out there, particularly those who draw or whose practice is centered around drawing, there is a really interesting residency. So, this is a shout out to Atelier des Arcs, which is in France, and they have a call for applications at the moment for a drawing research residency. So, this is really interesting because in most residencies you are there for three weeks, six weeks, you have to produce something, and so this particular residency is really interesting because it's a research residency, you do not have to produce anything. So the dates of the residency are from the 3rd to the 30th of September 2026. The deadline for applications is the 12th of December, midnight, Central European time. But beware, the call is open to professional contemporary artists of all ages, but they have to be based or come from the Occitanie, Pyrene, Mediterranean region. So if you subscribe to the newsletter already, you will have a link for the application there. If you want to go straight to the website, so it's atelier, so atelier, as you spell atelier plural, d D E S Ach, A R Q E S dot com, and you will have on the residencies, I think, the call for applications. It's the first text that you see when you click on it. We will be talking about Emily Kame Nare's work. It's at Tate Modern, curated by Kelly Cole, and this is an exhibition that traveled from Australia, from the National Gallery of Australia, and that exhibition was curated by Kelly Cole, Wara Mungu, and Laritcha Peoples, and Hetty Perkins, Harente and Calcadun Peoples. Um, so the exhibition is open until the 11th of January. One of the things you can do is to watch the podcast instead of listening to it on Spotify. So Spotify has video. I always do a video episode that you can listen to so you don't have to uh watch it, you can just do the audio version. You can watch it on YouTube as well, and another thing you can do is subscribe to the newsletter because usually I always post when, particularly if it exhibitions uh chin wag, I do a newsletter, but then I post another article only with images of the artist's work and with the little text accompanying it. So the last one was about Jenny Saville. So what I want to say about the work is that it is incredibly proliferous, and it starts with these very dense layers and overlayers of paintbrush dots. She had a very particular way of working, so she sat on the floor and she would hover over the canvas that wouldn't be stretched. So she would just work on the canvas almost as if she was working on a piece of fabric, a rectangular piece of fabric. But she was very precise about backgrounds. Sometimes she asked for the canvas to be prepared beforehand so that she could paint over it, and there are many, many variations of this very free use of the brush. There's a huge phase where there were these paintings with very sinuous lines, then with um sinuous lines or these sorts of underlayers with shapes that could be quite curved, where you could also see paw prints, animals, little lizards, the emus, so the animals that were important for her culture and that she communicated about. Then you have other works which are composite or groups of paintings on the wall, as as usual with her work, um, and they are quite atmospheric, so they associate these areas of different colours that are applied with uh quite a lot of freedom, as always. So there's a lot more that I could say and that I could describe, but so that you know, there is this incredible freedom, it was always her hand, her hand guided her, the song she had in her, um, the paintings were very much related to singing and to women's ceremonies. So the way the body was painted, so the body lines were painted uh from shoulder to shoulder, these sort of curved lines that would accompany the breasts, for example, all of those in some ways find themselves on the paintings, but they are completely reinterpreted, so you're not going to find um the same motives applied to canvases or the canvases seen as bodies. Actually, when you think about it, there's lines, there's dots, there's these shapes of colours. So the variation wouldn't seem to bring as much um variety and as much invention as it does. If it's not the color, it's the shape that's going to bring something new. So it's quite exciting, incredibly warm. Um, and when it's not warm, it's very emotional, so there's something always very vibrant in the paintings. Some of them are more subdued, but even those ones which are more in tones of brown, um, they are so dense. There's a density, there's an energy that is contained or released in the paintings. It's a very, very peculiar exhibition to be um experience to be in front of her work and to stay with it. Um it it was really uh an intriguing and uh thought-provoking and challenging in some ways, uh, experience to then think about the exhibition. Experiencing the exhibition was marvelous, and then of course, thinking about all the intricacies and the complexities of what it means to bring a culture onto the contemporary art museum, that's a whole other can of worms, if I may say so myself. I hope wherever you are that you experience the exhibition vicariously through us. And if you have the opportunity to come to London or to see Emily Kamelare's work in any other way, I hope you take that opportunity, seize it, because as far as I'm concerned, it is completely worthwhile. Now on with the episode. Thank you for sticking around and thank you for being a faithful listener and welcome if you are new here. Hello and welcome to Exhibition Chinwag, which is a segment that emulates the first season of the podcast, where Emily Harding and myself had really wonderful chats about solo exhibitions. And that's exactly what's going on today. And precisely with that person, Emily is back.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

It's so good to be back. I'm great. Thank you. It was uh it was so nice to you know be back in the habit of seeing a big show like this. And this is like since doing the podcast more regularly, I feel like there has been sort of a missing link in my life in terms of you know seeing art. So I've obviously seen bits and pieces here and there, but um, but yeah, it was really lovely to go back and lovely to go with you, which we didn't normally do before. So shaking things up.

SPEAKER_03 14:11

That's it. We completely changed the rules because why visit exhibitions separately? There's so much to say about art anyway. We it was a bit naive of me to think that we would exhaust the conversation right there and then.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Exactly. Exactly. Oh, you and me both.

SPEAKER_03 14:30

Do you know that this segment is called Exhibition Chinwag? And you were the one who introduced me to the word chinwag.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Ah, right, nice.

SPEAKER_03 14:41

Which still feels like something dirty and sexual to me. But okay. You know, something you would have to agree to with your partner. Do you know what I mean? I'm not. This word does not gel with me, but I find it so funny.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Would it, would it, would it require a safe word, something like that?

SPEAKER_03 15:03

I mean that's my feeling.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Good old chinois, good old nadder, as they say here.

SPEAKER_03 15:13

It's so good to have you back. So the exhibition we're going to talk about is Emily Kame Nare's exhibition at Tate Modern. Nare is an Aboriginal artist who passed away in 1996, so she is a 20th century artist. And we thought we could use a little bit of uh perspective from down under. So John MacDonald, our critic from Australia, from Sydney, is going to join us later because we felt that, and you're going to understand why, that we could use an input from someone who's over there. I think I wanted to also kind of give everyone who's listening a heads up. We are going to be very approximative with the philosophies behind the paintings because it's such a huge tradition, it's a different language, and I think they did that really well in the exhibition where we are confronted with a lot of words that we don't know how to pronounce, and that was done on purpose. And it's a way of thinking and living, the land that we can only kind of try to approach. So I thought of looking at the map of Aboriginal Australia first, because I think that's one of the things that I looked for first, um, to kind of have a sense of how many peoples were there, how were the First Nations distributed? And so I put it in our document that can you see it?

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:43

So it is quite different than the Australia map that we were used to seeing.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

It is a phenomenal number of different regions and areas that represent different peoples, and the way that it kind of cuts across the continent of Australia is Yeah, is very different than the way you'd normally see it, but also very representative of her work because she has lots of that section, big sections that represent different pieces of land, and you know, kind of how different parts of the land join up to one another. It felt a little bit resent representative of some of the work that she's doing.

SPEAKER_03 17:23

Yeah, I'm I'm really astonished with the number of peoples. So it looks like a quilt with very small bits that kind of make up the whole fabric of it, and so you have an incredible number of peoples, and you have all these little colours, it's very colourful, and you have all these names of communities that lived in specific areas of the whole continent. I was really taken by this map because I thought I don't know a single word in here, and just to situate you, so Emily Kame Nare is from the Northern Territory, but not the bit that goes up to Darwin and then the coast. She's more from the inland, so the Sandover area of the Northern Territory, specifically Alalkere, in the Sandover area of the Northern Territory. And she was born around um 1910. We don't have a specific date. She then lived in a place called Utopia in the Northern Territory, and she passed away in Alice Springs, which is probably the biggest city in that area, on the 3rd of September of 1996. But there's also something that is really important to her, and that's why I wanted to have a look at the map, is that um she is also part of the Anmatir Central Desert Region language group. One of the things that also defines a community is the language they speak. So this language goes across those different borders that you see in um in that aboriginal map of Australia. I clearly saw two very distinct narratives coming up. So let's let's take the the Tate. There's a video on the website in the presentation of the exhibition. There's a, you know, Tate always does these short films. And so the Tate film starts with um a voice. We presume it's Emily's talking about her way of life. And so she says that they lived uh behind windbreaks, sometimes in caves, they would make shelters with grass many years ago. So you have these views of the landscape. So the landscape of the Northern Territory is very orange, very dry, with it's the bush, you know, it really is kind of very specific landscape, and this is in the olden times. So the idea of the olden times is presented, and at second 27, so this is a 7.27 minute video, you know, pops up this archival footage and this voice, this television voice saying, Nare's work has broken record prices. Her work has, and I quote, become too costly for even big public galleries to acquire these days.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Emily Carme and Ware set a new record for the artist, bring glimpses of the desert to the stark walls of the Emily Carme and Yangware was around 80 years old when she first put Brush to campus.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

She lived on an isolated Central Australian community.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Emily Naware.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

So it's immediately the greatness, 2.1 million is thrown at you.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Which is like the highest amount a woman has ever been paid for a piece of art, is that right? Something like that?

SPEAKER_03 20:49

Well, no, because in auction sales you're not paid. That's uh sales between owners of work. So if if it had been through her gallery, then she would have seen the money. But if it's in an auction sale, then it's a sort of a, you know, it's the speculative side of the market. Another thing that is said quite quickly is that she started painting at age 80. So she became a full-blown artist when most people are not only retired, but also kind of, you know, leaving the space for the juniors, you know?

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're not they're not starting their passion projects typically at 80. My mom is turning 80 in November, and who knows? I mean, maybe maybe there's a painter in her that will blossom from this, but um I think she's gonna stop making installations with old C rooms. Or she could just kind of continue with her Tuesday card games and you know, kind of her normal course of uh, you know, oxygenarian life.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

So then you are so the history then comes up obviously. So the name utopia we're told came from white settlers. It is quite a startling name. I thought, wow, utopia.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

It's very specific. It has a very resonant kind of, it's a resonant word, utopia. And I think especially for that area, you know, it's like, you know, as you were describing, like it's a desert, it's harsh, you know, you you you know, you're sleeping behind windbreaks, and you know, you know, it's not an easy life as we would imagine, an easy life, and utopia definitely chimes that, you know, that that meaning for us of like, oh, the easy life, it's beautiful. So I like I like the juxtaposition of it.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

We learned that that juxtaposition, and I think that's a great word, came from white settlers. So what happened is that Aboriginal communities settled there to find work and ended up, so this was a pastoral region. So you had cattle stations that were established by white settlers, and the Aboriginal communities um st stayed there, it is said in the video, for work. And so we learned that Nare worked there as a cattle, it is said also camel handler.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Yeah. I saw that too, actually. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:26

Listen. We don't know. Uh perhaps even minding the children of white families. We don't quite know, but it's kind of a hypothetical um idea of what she may have done. And we also learned that she witnessed the fights for the Aboriginal rights to the land. And then we move on to what was the really um pivotal moment in Lara's life, which was to find out about the batik technique with the groups of uh the group of women she was with as part of a women's education program. And that kind of, as I was saying to Emily before we started recording, there's a Portuguese expression, I I have a flea behind my ear, which means it's sort of a nagging impression of bummer. You need to get some spray for that girl. So that kind of I thought education program, what does that mean and why? We're in the middle of utopia. In 1988, Naray did her first painting on canvas called MU Woman, which propelled her into the art scene. That painting was it was seen, it was adored, and that marked a period into painting for her that allowed her to create for eight years. So she produced about 3,000 works, more or less.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:46

Give or take, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, and that I mean I just love the fact that there was a women's education program because it's like, you know, we were talking about before we started recording kind of all of the differences that are taking place in terms of the US and values around the Smithsonian, etc. Right. Yeah, Trump's the portion of Yeah, part of what's been cut though is like USAID and kind of, you know, those kind of development programs that would have had, you know, that would have supported stuff like this. I mean, the British Council does it here. And, you know, you look at what came from one of those programs, not that the point of it is to have somebody like Emily, whose artworks win lots and lots of money. That's not necessarily the point of it. But um, but you know, the fact that, you know, it it's generative of so much and so much of the Batik work in general, you know, has come through those programs. And yeah, anyway. And aside to today's politics, how it's how it's undermining the next uh Emily Noire.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

And we have Batik pieces in the exhibition with quite extraordinary.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:01

It is said in the exhibition that her works are centered around Ankra, the emu, so emu woman, or Iweli, which is uh body paint, but also a term that more or less means women's ceremony. So this is the narrative, one way of looking at it, which is that there's an ancestral way of life. Um there's records breaking prices in auction sales, there's this announcement of the greatest Australian artists who, by the way, started painting at 80 years old and who, by the way, is a woman, which is very uncommon thing, so a sort of a phenomenon that comes a bit ex nihilo into the art market and the let's say the art field. She worked as an animal handler, started with Batik, and she was inspired by body paint and is surrounded by a group of women, which to me is kind of what I gathered immediately when I went into the exhibition. Of course, I was a bit shocked with this idea that you could start an artistic career at 80, although it's not the she's not the first one, but as you were saying, exceptions exist, but that's not obviously the rule. Um, so for me, it is a narrative that is a westernized cultural narrative, which is my culture. You know, it's kind of the way I'm going to approach very naturally, if I don't second guess myself, I'm going to very naturally approach the narrative in this way. So we learned that locally her work was discovered and minded by a few people.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Sorry, can I uh just just about that kind of uh looking at her within a Western narrative? Uh, you wonder if Aboriginal in Aboriginal culture is maybe they were like, well, of course, you know, you do the most important things when you're old in life. You know, I mean, you know, we're you know, we're I'm I'm totally unsurprised by my mom, you know, having her regular, you know, coffee clutch in the morning and her card games and things like that. That seems normal. But maybe, you know, in that community, it's like, well, of course, you manifest all of your wisdom and you manifest your talents. And, you know, it's not a it's not a slow roll down the hill. It's like a slow roll up a hill in in a way, or I don't know, I'm that's probably the wrong analogy, but you know what I mean? It's you wonder you in your um script, in your script for the for the episode, you have those, you know, bullet points of ancestral way of life and all the things that you just talked about, worked as an animal handler, started with Patique. The thing that really defines her work is that notion that she is in and of the land, that she is, even when she's making the works, she's sitting down on the land, and you get the sense that everything around her is being infused into it. And and that is so different than aesthetics, which is the Western way of engaging with things. Um, and she has, you know, as I was, as I was kind of reading about her and looking at things, you know, it just struck me as like, can it can a piece of art be wise? And I think her art can be wise because it's less about aesthetics and oh, I'm gonna try it this way because I think the dots and the lines look interesting and this, but it's she is she is like transmitting knowledge through her work. She is this is a history book and a celebration, and it is so much more than aesthetics. I mean, you know, before I knew I didn't know anything really about her before the exhibition. And when you look at the adverts, you know, you think Jackson Pollack, like that's not an, you know, I mean, I think a lot of people who don't know her might think, oh, this is sort of like, you know, abstraction, what have you, expression. And um, and she's figurative, you know, that's what, you know, I I don't think I I went in with a certain mindset thinking that it was gonna be, you know, kind wow, she's kind of like modern without having known about the school and all of that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 30:29

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's a lot about there's a lot to say about the painting, right? In terms of our own categories to talk about it. And and we're getting there. So just to finish with the this idea of the market. So there's a market for Aboriginal art that starts kind of coming up and becoming really established at the end of the 70s, and then from there on, Emily Kame Nare is not the only Aboriginal artist in the market, but she's definitely the special one. So, for example, collector and dealer Hank Ebes in a YouTube video says and describes her in those terms that I have just laid down. Uh, so, quote, she was a stone age nomad. She'd never sat in a car before she was 50. So that's kind of the vision he has of her. And then he tells the story of her grandson of hers that came to him because the grandson felt that Aboriginal artists were being exploited, and he wanted someone trustworthy to take care of the work. And so Ebes recognized obviously Nare's name, and he said, Okay, I'm I'm gonna look into this. He started dealing her work, but also others, and also collecting it. So there's this established market, and there's also this idea that the family that I wanted to introduce as well, that the family participates in this, and we're going to see how and and why. So, this is not a situation where the white person comes, takes the work, and then puts it in the museum. It's it's a more complex situation, and you very rightly pointed out to the women's program, and there's a lot to do with that. There's a role that it it plays in there. And so he also says, and I'm quoting him, she's an artist with a pedigree of 40,000 years. So the idea of the pedigree and the idea of the timelessness really brings home this notion that Aboriginal peoples don't have a history, they're static, and we have a progression, can you know, conversely, in not only in history, but also in uh contemporary, modern, classic, etc. art terms. And so he believes, Ebes, that, and he says this in the video had she lived a hundred years before, she'd have done exactly the same thing. So there's this idea that the Aboriginal person carries this truth or this aesthetic and just put it puts it out there. So this is really the Western narrative that is kind of doubled by a praise, a sort of praise for her modernity that is almost seen like a coincidence. So we have met through a sort of um preference historically. And so um the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2022-2023 established or curated this exhibition called Affinities of Lewitt's later works. And when you look at them, they're real squiggles and kind of undulating lines with very different colours than what he started with in the beginning, which was no colour, then primary colours, and here there's a real mix of very unexpected colours for Lewitt. And then the exhibition is in dialogue with a wall of Anmatier, so this language group artists, Nare and Gloria Tamere Petiare. And so there is this idea that there's a modernism and a sort of a dialogue going on in the work, and in the same museum, um, the way the artist is presented is, and I quote, as a leading figure in Eastern Ant Matier ceremony. So that already tells us something. The ceremonial aspect is really important. Uh Naray was also the artist in whose work many white Australians first felt the force of an indigenous art that could be seen to negotiate a space both with the aesthetics of Western abstraction and the timeless precepts of Aboriginal cultural traditions. And again, we have this idea of timelessness and this idea of a resonance that is also a dialogue between both cultures. And she's also presented as having a strong relation to country. And thank you, Emily, because you did say that earlier on, and that is true. And the way it is described is again in Western terms. So in there's a the description of a uh a work called Untitled Al-Alkir, and maybe we'll get to the reason why it's called like this later on, from 1992. And the description is that it has been, quote, perceived as a lyrical mapping of country, a poeticizing of the desert in bloom, or simply as a spectacular abstract painting, unquote. And so in the Tate film, we also talk about thin boundaries between the worlds of the spiritual and the material in her work, and her work is explained as the way these two elements or planes interconnect or interrelate. And you can see that really well in the first room of the exhibition as you go in and you see the dotted paintings of the beginning, so pre-93, I think, where there's this sort of really strange effect of, like you say, polo from afar, but then you see it's just dots. And then you have, we were talking about it when we visited the exhibition, which there's layers and layers and layers of dots, and at a certain point you feel like you're embedded in them. I don't know if you did you have that feeling?

SPEAKER_01 36:39

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean it's it's i i it it felt both like um being embedded in it, like you can't see the wood through the trees, you know, like you're really in something, but then also hovering above it, like when you kind of step back and look at some of the the shapes.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

They're almost an integral part of the dots, but at the same time, they're they're also an underlying lair, and you have lizards and geckos and these these little animals embedded in them.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Emo prints, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

By the way, did you look up emos? Have you seen the emos? Do you know I haven't? They are the most adorable things. So they're one of the biggest birds in the world, like they're the third biggest bird in the world, and they're flightless. So, I mean, and and to me, like the notion of a flightless bird is just so endearing, you know. It's like, we'll give you wings, but they're not gonna be good for the good stuff, you know. So they they're enormous, they have these tiny little uh six-inch wings that are basically just there to cool themselves off in the heat. And they but they have these really long legs and knees that are almost kind of right by their hips, so they could run up to 30 miles an hour, and uh they they can, you know, they can they can take steps as big as like nine feet in full stride, but but and their little faces are so cute. So I can see why she she she was enthralled. I'm I'm feeling you, Emily, on that one.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

Yeah, well, yeah, it is a really important um bird for her, and there's we'll we're going to see there's different elements for her that are really important. So another element of the exhibition, as soon as you get into the second room, you see an image of country, which for us is an image of the Northern Territory where uh so the central parts of the Northern Territory where Emily Kame Nare uh grew up and lived. She moved a lot in that territory, by the way. That's why there's a reference of her nomadic ways, and some people do say that she moved quite a lot, but as you say, there's this idea and this notion that puzzled me a little bit, which was that very quickly it is introduced to you and very well done, by the way, very well explained, that each painting is country and it is everything. She says, she said often, this is everything. And so we were talking about how the paintings were the land, and there is no dissociation between country, land, and dreaming. So the dreaming or country. And they seem to, like you were saying, like you seem to be hovering above the land, and so very usefully so, you have images pasted onto the wall, these very massive expanses, photographic expanses of the land. So you have a sort of a direct equivalence between the paintings as expressions of that landscape. But Emily Caminare, I'm pretty sure she never took a plane or a helicopter. She's never seen it from above. So it's so interesting to see what kind of mapping is this.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I guess, I guess from those high points, she could have seen, you know, quite a bit of the country, even if she hadn't been, you know, in a plane or, you know, kind of above it in that sense. I I think, you know, in her relationship to country, you know, she's always looking down. She's not looking up. You know, there's there's no references to sky that I can think of.

SPEAKER_03 40:32

I saw some references to constellations and and looking upwards in some text that I read. In the exhibition, but that didn't come across in the exhibition.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Yeah, but I mean, and I thought that was interesting that you know, there, you know, there is a very distinct relationship with the ground, with the underground, with the lay of the land. She's a landscape painter in some respects. And then she continue.

SPEAKER_03 40:59

Yeah, so um absolutely. Uh that there's a um there's a yeah, that you're out, yeah, that's so true. There's a real kind of like lowering of onto the ground on on in her paintings. So r when we got out, we picked up a few books, and I bought this book called Songlines by Marg O'Neill and Lynn Kelly, The Power and Promise. And Marg O'Neill actually organized one of the first exhibitions of um Emily Kamenare in Queensland. So she describes a little bit uh what this uh Aboriginal set of beliefs and uh histories and relationships to land. And so she starts by saying, Everything starts and so I'm quoting here, everything starts and ends with country in the aboriginal worldview. Yet there are no endings in this worldview, nor are there any beginnings. Time and place are infinite and everywhere. Everything is part of a continuum, an endless flow of life and ideas emanating from country, which some refer to as the dreaming. In the dreaming, as in country, there is no separation between the animate and inanimate. Everything is living, people, animals, plants, earth, water, and air. We speak of sea, land, and sky country. Creator ancestors created the country and its interface, the dreaming. In turn, dreaming speaks for country, which holds the law and knowledge. Country has dreaming, country is dreaming. It is this oneness of all things that explains how and why Aboriginal knowledges belong to an integrated system of learning. And so later on, she says, A country holds so I'm quoting here again. Country holds information, innovations, stories and secrets, from medicine, engineering, ecology, and astronomy to show social mores on how to live and social organization, including moiety, division, and kinship systems. It is the wellspring from which all knowledge originates and gives rise to the expression our history is written in the land. By history we mean all knowledge, science, sciences, humanities, and ancestral knowledge, not only what is compartmentalized as Western history. If country holds all knowledge, then country is clever. And then she goes on to say, as our knowledge system encompasses a concept of time that talks of the enduring present and eternal time, the Western divisions of past, present, and future, or historical and contemporary, are not particularly relevant, though they are useful at times. This recycling of time is embodied in the expression. When you look behind you, you see the future in your footprints. And so here we have not really a notion of timelessness, but a different relationship with the very idea of history. This idea that everything comes from land, everything comes from country, but not just this sort of mystical relationship to country, but very specifically technical relationships and answers for problem solving, basically, like engineering and ecological systems and knowledge of the country. So Lynn Kelly is really interesting because she explains that she didn't know anything about Aboriginal history. She complains that at school she was never taught Aboriginal history. And the idea that she had was that there was no history and there was no science. But when she finally had to study a particular kind of crocodile, I think. So she was looking at an animal, she went to her colleagues, tried to find out things about this species, and 10 or 12 were known. And the only people who actually knew a hundred or more specimens and behaviors, etc., about the animal were the Aboriginal people.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

I mean, I think that's so, you know, looking at uh looking at the work and the way that she worked, you know, again, that sitting on the ground doing the work, it has a real meditative quality. You know, you get the sense that she is someone who has been, even though she hasn't been painting until she was 80 years old, she was, she had this deep observation that comes from actually really being in a place. You know, when you are really in a place and you know it intimately, you see the various varieties of crocodiles. You know, I mean, and that's just not, you know, again, to your point of, you know, the the differences in approach and understanding and um, you know, defining what is, you know, there's that very lab scientific, you know, go out and find approach, and there's the live, observe, embodied approach that she seems to have with the work that she's done.

SPEAKER_03 46:13

And so one of the things that you learn in this book, and that's why it's called song lines, is that there's a very clear articulation between the movement of making those sinuous lines, for example. And these these lines are very close to the gestures of applying paint for the ceremonies, for the women's ceremonies. But there's also another aspect, which is the voice and the and the song. And so country is also sung. And those lines and those these paintings are also sung. And so sometimes, apparently, Emily Kame Nare was notoriously silent about the works. And so she didn't explain the work, but she would sometimes touch a painting and and sing it.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

I saw that. Yeah, that's so cool. And she, yeah, so so it was hard to get names of any of the paintings out of her. So that's apparently why so many are called country, is just because she would just say repeat that again and again. Country is is what it is, country is everything, yeah. Although there were some great names like wild potato dreaming, and there's like bush potato dreaming, and we did have were pretty choice.

SPEAKER_03 47:27

You know, we had a moment there with the wild potato dreaming. We just kind of stood there, kind of like, wow, that's gorgeous. So her role was to learn its ancient history and all the physical characteristics as well as responsibilities associated with maintaining the continuity of the land. So for her, these paintings are a transmission, and you use this word, and it's a very, very good one, because as we will see, there's really this relationship with um communication with another side of the country and other people. So what we learn as well is that um her people were forced to work for pastoralists. So she worked at Woodgreen Station looking after domestic animals and also led camel trains and even worked in a mine, the Wolfram mine, in return for rations. And so she was a ceremonial leader. She was also active, I learn in this text, in the land rights movement. And another question that I had was why Batik? What happened? Why were there only women? Well, so to go back, so the women's programs were built by someone who was there who saw women waiting for the children when they went to school. So and she thought, why not try and do something with them? And so they started by doing tie-dye, which was kind of this remnant of hippie culture. And the women took to these things, the women took to this culture and to these traditions because they had this practice, this artistic practice for ages. So they had this knowledge of mark making and line making and pattern making, and they loved tie-dye, but they loved batik even more, which is an Indonesian technique. And I was kind of baffled why batik.

SPEAKER_01 49:28

Yeah, me too. Yeah. And it's really difficult, batik. I mean, it is not, you know, I I didn't really realize that the process of it was so involved. Um, you know, I think it's interesting that, you know, her batiks, Emily's batiks, a lot of the same themes you can see, obviously, in the early paintings in particular. But just like from an aging perspective, it's like, you know, you can see her age through her through her work. It's like that really, she did batik for 10 years before she started painting. And that's, you know, you've got to stretch it across your legs, and then you've got to, you know, make the marks, and then there's a whole process.

SPEAKER_03 50:11

Melted wax. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 50:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:13

So you have to build a fire to melt the wax.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

And then, you know, she moves to paint, and it's this really intensive process where you see all these little dots, and you know, that that is, you know, not easy either. It's like, you know, that's reasonably laborious, less laborious than batik. But then you see her kind of move from dots to more of the sinuous lines of the, you know, of the yam roots or what have you. And and I just love the fact that, you know, someone who is that expert at batik could think, man, this is too hard for me now. I'm old, and really kind of stick there, you know, and be like, oh, I'm really gonna grieve the fact that I can't do Batik anymore. But she just plowed on. Like this woman just moved forward with such force. I mean, she was obviously, as you said, 3,000 paintings in eight years plus, probably, probably even more than. But there was just no kind of hesitation. And it was like, oh, well, I can't do this anymore, then I'll do this, then I'll just push it to the next thing and and see what works for me as a human being where I am right now. And I found that really inspiring as someone who just had their 50th birthday.

SPEAKER_03 51:23

It's like, Yes! Happy birthday, Emily! Well, there's so in that story and then that real progression, so there's an aspect that this text um kind of sheds sheds light on, which is that all of these materials were brought to these women. So there's a group of women, first of all, this is communal. And the reason why the batik started being made was that this was also a way for the uh group of people, for this community to be sustainable. So it was supposed to be marketed and sold, and for them to make money. And the way money was made was a person, one of the artists, would sell work, and then the money would arrive, it would be shown to everyone and shared amongst everyone. So Emily Kamenare became this artist who was a provider because Christopher Hodges, he was um who had a gallery, I think Utopian Art Gallery is called, uh, or Utopia Art Gallery, but he was also an artist. He explains that what was absolutely incredible is that you would have this shop with, you know, a hodgepodge of things, then one of uh Emily Kameare's batikes, and connoisseurs, non-connoisseurs, people be drawn to that batik. She really had uh a vibrant quality to her work, even and and we saw that in the exhibition in the batik works, and so she started selling quite a bit, and she started being really, really successful, and so she moved on to painting. One of the reasons is basically what you were saying, she was tired, but she had stuff in her, she that had to come out somehow, and so another thing, much so that in 1992 she received an Australian Arts Creative Fellowship, which is a huge recognition of her work as someone who brought uh an enormous contribution to the culture. For Emily at the time, 1992 was I had the creative fellowship, I was recognized, I'm a senior, now I want to pass on my knowledge to the youngsters. I'm I want to retire. She was tired, but she couldn't do it because the demands of the community and the family never made this possible because she was the great provider. There is no notion of the solitary genius. Time for a short break to let you into the exhibitionista studio. Look around you. There is a computer, a good mic, the software in the computer, which is a sort of virtual space through which you and I meet with a time and space delay. Then there are my books, and two perfectly round flintstones. All the magic happens here. I've been talking to a university whose students need placements, and I could use some assistance with production and research while also mentoring the future professionals of the field. And that's where you come in. Do you know how much a membership costs? A mere twenty-five pounds a year, which means that you pay two pounds a month. 25 pounds for a whole year. When you buy a catalogue, that's the average price for one single book with two texts. If you become a member of Exhibitionists through a platform called Substack, you not only get to support Exhibitionists, but you also receive on average about 18 more texts minimum that I will have written about many, many, many fascinating topics of contemporary arts, philosophy of art, and many other subjects. There's a little bonus that I added, which is getting to ask me questions. If you have a question about contemporary arts, about the field, about the market, about studies in contemporary art, I'm very, very happy to do the research for you or to dig into my little well of knowledge and put the information out there for you. I can name you or you can be anonymous. So you get to put me to work as long as the questions and the prompts you give me are within my abilities. Otherwise, you can go to donor books in the description notes. If you have one pound to spare, you can just donate one time. It's very, very small amounts. That's what I do with Wikipedia. Once in a while, I put some money in there because I use it almost daily. And I want to reward people who nourish me. Thank you for spending some time with me here in my studio. Thank you for considering this decent proposal on with the episode. We've never done this in Exhibitionistas to have someone just popping in from down under and giving us a bit of context. But I it's my pleasure to welcome John MacDonald to the podcast. John is an art critic, has I want to say four decades of art criticism in um there am I am I wrong in saying that?

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Uh unfortunately you're absolutely correct. I I I it's sort of shocking how long we've been doing it. But it is about four decades now. I've been writing about the visual arts now for about four decades. I was art critic, I was senior art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald at the age of 23, and I'm now in my early 60s. So it's been a long time. Uh most of that time I I wrote a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald. I was actually cancelled last year, uh in rather uh well, kind of shocking circumstances at the way they did it, in a very, very sort of nasty way, as if they wanted me to just disappear off the planet. But the problem really was not that I was doing anything wrong, the problem was that I was doing my job and I was criticizing things and I was taking things on and I was looking for issues. I found that the last three years of writing, everything it was getting cansed, messed around, and um when I found myself out on my own, I started this website on Substack, which is called Everything the Art World Doesn't Want You To Know. And it's taken off like a rocket. So I can't really complain now. I feel as though it's been all to the good. So the Emily show, which I, you know, I basically funded my own trip to London to uh see the show and write about it has led to at least three pieces. And one of the reasons I wanted to see this show so badly and to write about it was I had seen all the other Emily shows. I saw and wrote about the shows in 1998, in 2008, and the one last year at the National Gallery in Canberra. And at the time, I mean I was critical of the show in Canberra, not of the work itself, because I think that Emily Carmay and Ware is a is a great artist, and at her very best, you know, she's fantastic. But it was the curatorial aspect of the show, the selection of works, the way it was done, and the fact that, you know, an artist who really requires a little bit of thought when you're putting an exhibition like this together was done in a very pedestrian manner. So I said all these things and I was quite explicit with the criticisms, even of the catalogue, which had enormous clangers in the catalogue. Just to see whether or not the Tate, when they did the show the following year, would follow the NGA template, or whether they would do something different, whether they would at least correct the mistakes, whether they would um think again about the selection of works. Because this particular selection, you know, remarkably leaves out Emily's biggest, and some think her best work, which is Earth's Creation, a work shown in 2007 at the Venice Biennale by Aquien Wazor, who and it was a a sensation for a lot of people to see that big work all by itself in the Italian Pavilion. That's most people's introduction to Emily, and weirdly it wasn't in the show. The other works which are not in the show, which are absolute essentials, were the last work she did, which were a group of small works, so there were about twenty-four. Most of them are still in uh with the hands of one dealer, and they were omitted as well. Whereas the exhibition in 2008 in Osaka which was everything in Osaka's a strange museum, it's it's almost underground. On the top level, you walked in and you were met with Earth Creation, one big whopping painting, and all of the information you needed to know about Emily, about the Utopia community, all of the anthropological stuff, all of the things about the community, just giving you an introduction that so you had the knowledge to take into that exhibition. Then when you went downstairs and you entered the exhibition, the first thing you saw were all of her last works. And it was really quite stunning because these works are very poignant.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:48

Yeah, I read somewhere that the curators of the show still keep an Emily Day as a sort of a tradition because of the sensation that the exhibition was and the and the audiences that it brought into the museum. Is that true? Did you hear that?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:05

No, it's perfectly true. Every year they keep an Emily Day as a memorial to that show. It was a it they would have not they would not have seen anything like it. I mean, even to um curate an exhibition with Margot O'Neill must have been an incredible shock to the system. Because if you know, you know, Japanese people by nature are a very polite, very formal, whereas Margot is rather the opposite. Margot is, well, as we say in Australia, rough as guts.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:32

Margot Neal is wait, you're gonna tell me if that's correct. She's an Australian author, historian, and curator of Aboriginal and Irish descent, and a Gumbiren Ira Juri woman. And her Aboriginal name is Ngawa Gurawa. Emily, do you have any questions for John?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

I mean, look, John, my role here is the novice, okay? So I am not in the art world at all. And um, so this might be a little bit of a naive question, but you mentioned um, you know, key pieces that you felt were missing from the exhibition, the one from the Venice Biennale and these smaller works that you referenced. Why do you think they weren't included? Do you what would do you think that was a choice of the curator, or were they just not able to get them?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:20

Well, there were a number of issues involved here, and one of them was that the curators, Hetty Perkins and Kelly Cole, did not have any personal experience of Emily. Kelly claims to have seen Emily when she was 16, you know, out in country. But you know, Kelly wasn't a curator and didn't have any sense of it. Apart from that, so they didn't really have anybody involved who had who knew Emily or had even seen or remembered some of these big exhibitions. Neither of the curators had seen the shows in Japan, for instance, which are absolutely crucial. When it came down to doing a show, they wanted to do a different show because the previous show was twenty years ago. They wanted to do something different. But unfortunately, their idea of doing something different meant to exclude quite deliberately all of the people who were involved in the previous shows and who knew a lot more about the topic. Um, someone like Margot, the Tate originally approached Margot Neal and asked her about this show, and she said, No, I can't do it, or I'm not doing another Emily. Why don't you talk to the National Gallery of Australia? So they did talk to the National Gallery of Australia, with the result being that the National Gallery of Australia curators then proceeded to completely write Margot out of the picture. She didn't even get an invitation to the opening of the show in Canberra, although Hetty and Kelly swore that she did get one and perhaps it got lost in the mail. They did not they also wrote out as much as they could, Chris Hodges, who was the original dealer, who took paint and canvas to Emily with Rodney Gooch and showed all of her early work. It was another remarkable thing because Chris knows Emily knew Emily very, very well. He spent you know m years you know side by side with her about all sorts of things. Why would you leave these people out? Instead, they took as their expert knowledge Delane Davidson, who is a dealer who's making waves at the moment internationally selling Aboriginal.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:20

Wait, sorry, Delane is the gallery that is now associated with pace in the the selling.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:28

Delane had a show with pace to coincide with the Emily exhibition at the Tate, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:34

Right. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:36

But Delane gets most of his Emily's from one source, which is Delmore Downs, which is the Hot the Holtz. Uh they have a rather a controversial role to play in the Emily story, in as much as they were the property next door to Utopia, where Emily and the other artists lived. Emily would go there and work for the Holtz and really churn out paintings. So of 30,000 paintings, probably two-thirds would have been done. Uh oh, sorry, 3,000, 30,000, goodness, at Sidney Nolan would talk.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:10

I want so just one question, a qu a very quick answer. They're being discredited in the sense that they're being kind of ignored and set aside, or are they being discredit uh discredited as not being uh original or that or fakes or whatever? I don't know. What what's the reason?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:30

It's totally ambiguous. It's scuttle butt. It's saying it's basically implying that that certain dealers are not honest, uh are not legitimate, that the works are somehow doubtful. But this is simply not true. I mean, there is there are a lot of works out there which are perfectly valid Emily's that simply were disqualified from being in the show. And you know, the Tate, I believe, really should have done its own research and looked into these things if they wanted to do a A first class assembly show. What they got instead was they just took everything the National Gallery did, and the Tate in fact gave virtually nothing back. But when I was there on opening night and I looked around and it was Kangaroo Valley and every wall-to-wall Australians, they were all white faces. There was nobody from Utopia, and I think that is an unforgivable omission, and it says a great deal about the thinking behind this show, or rather the neglect behind this show.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:28

Well, thank you so much, John. This was really precious to have your perspective on things. Yeah, thank you. That was great.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:34

Well, as I was saying, I I think I got a little peek into the underworld of politics. Thank you, John. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:40

Okay. Thank you, John. Thank you, Emily. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:42

Bye-bye. How do you feel about all this? I think for me, it makes me think of outsider art and how you manage these collections and how you manage the production of these artists.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:54

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, it's like how you manage an artist is outside of my field of expertise. I couldn't, you know. I mean, all I can talk about is the exhibition and how I felt about it, to be perfectly honest. And was talking about how the exhibition felt very flat. And I mean, to me, it was phenomenally exciting. You know, it's like this is my first introduction into her. And, you know, I knew nothing about her before I went in. And I thought that, you know, for me as someone with novice perspective, going in and seeing the um trajectory of her uh development, you know, and and just how much she changed and was obviously trying new things, I felt, I felt that throughout. I mean, I felt like there was a propulsion through it. I mean, I think after you and I saw that video, which was maybe halfway through, maybe a little more than halfway through. Yes, it is. Yeah. You know, and we went into the second to last room. I, after we saw that video, I thought, oh, well, I've probably seen what she does. Like she only did anything for eight years. She only did painting for eight years. You know, I we've probably seen the thing that she does, and this will be a continuation on from that. And it was just like, you know, you know, diving into a whole new pool. So it was interesting to hear his perspective, obviously, from someone who has known the work for so long and has seen things that I have not seen, and experienced curation from someone who had such an intimate relationship with the artist, or a much more intimate relationship at the very least. Um, but as he was talking about the flatness, I was just like, wow, I I did so didn't experience that.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:43

That's yeah, that's really true. I think. I mean, I I agree with parts of what you're saying. I was really happy to see the exhibition. And then as you move on to the other room, there's these kind of atmospheric, almost uh textural and almost 3D impressions with incredible arrays of colours that she asked for, didn't use, then use others according to Christopher Hodges that uh Joan was mentioning. She she has she knew exactly what she wanted to do in the moment. And then you move on to the to the room where it kind of it kind of becomes again like those ramifications of white lines on black. And I felt I showed you I had goosebumps in front of a lot of paintings. So this doesn't this discourse doesn't take away the fact that this is an incredible experience that you should not, you know, uh prevent yourself from having in despite all the other politics that are important and where I disagree with you is that that progression I find really sterile. So in some ways I found the show really flattening things in this chronological order and then reserving that impact at the end where I think the works were so impactful all the way through, and it kind of created an artificial highlight that really corresponds to a modernist idea of painting. I think I what I would say is just spend time with the paintings that talk to you and just stay there and just I'm definitely gonna go back to the painting.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:22

I'm gonna go back. I mean, you know, I mean he was talking about the batikes and how they were selling the batiks from all the women who were making them, and obviously hers had a real presence that drew people in, and you know, certainly with her paintings as well. It's like, I mean, while there there may be different decisions that could have been made or different considerations made in the curation, it is still rooms full of these, you know, incredible, incredible works that I yeah, yeah. I I I am definitely gonna go again and you know. I mean, and I I've told Peter, you have to go. Because he was like, Well, you've already been, so maybe I won't go. And I was like, You have to go, because I'm going again as well. So yeah, so I I yeah, I I loved it. Yeah, goosebumps for sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:14

Yeah, me too was really exceptional. And there's another element as well, which you hear the voices of the group of women uh singing the paintings as well at a certain point in the exhibition, and that is also really magical. It's not done in the best way, I find, but the pleasure of actually having the the opportunity to listen even in an artificial setting, I think you also have your own critical sense. And I fight for this idea of you being empowered by your own experience of the works. And it was so nice going with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

That was really nice. I loved that. Wagamama and a Tate show with Joanna. I mean, that's a that's a good lineup. That's a very good lineup. So grab a friend and uh go see a show.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:03

And if Wagamam wants to sponsor us, we're here, and we can always try to find the nearest Wagamama in museums in London.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:10

I love the hustle, Joanna.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:12

Thank you so much, Emily. This was a pleasure as ever. Thank you. All right, take good care of yourself. Take care. Bye-bye, everyone. Bye-bye. Exhibition This is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevers. We have episodes every two weeks, and this season, season three, is a bit of a turning point. We have five new episode types from more experimental art travelogues or art stories to conversational formats about solo exhibitions with people who are not part of the industry. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life. If you're new here, you have a whole catalogue of episodes to enjoy. Discover them at your own pace.