Aboriginal Art – Humoring the Goddess

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (or Emily Kam Ngwarray) (1910 – 1996) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory of Australia.She is one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of Australian art.Her remarkable work was inspired by her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder, and her lifelong custodianship of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.Kngwarreye began painting on canvas in her late seventies after decades of ritual artistic activity and batik fabric painting.Unlike most desert painters at the time, Kngwarreye did not use stylized representations of animal tracks or concentric circles in her designs.Instead, she employed richly layered brushstrokes or dabs throughout her abstract compositions.Her free handling of paint using various implements, keen sense of color, and dynamic compositions earned her international fame.It was in Alhalkere that the essence of her being resided, and it was her Dreaming that was the source of the creative power, of her knowledge.So profound was her identification with Alhalkere that it infused her life and her belief system, and governed her kinship relations and connections with other people.More of Emily Kame Kngwarreye‘s amazing original works can be found at https://www.wikiart.org/en/emily-kame-kngwarreye and https://artguide.com.au/art-plus/emily-kame-kngwarreye/.

Wawiriya Burton is an Australian Aboriginal artist known for her acrylic paintings.

Burton belongs to the Pitjantjatjara, an Aboringinal people of the Central Australian desert near Uluru.She was born in outback central Australia sometime during the 1920s, and grew up living a traditional, nomadic way of life.

She originally specialized in baskets and punu (wood carvings) from spinifex (a perennial coastal plant) at the Tjala Arts Centre in Southern Australia in 2008, but later learned to paint from other women.

Her paintings are representations of sacred stories from the Dreamtime.Like other Aboriginal artists, the representations are blurred (or encrypted) for cultural reasons.The full meaning of her artworks can only be understood or deciphered by people who have been initiated.Burton is a ngangkaṟi (traditional healer), so she has more knowledge about sacred traditions than most in her community.