You may have never heard of her, but in Australia the Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray is a household name, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. An elder of the Anmatyerr communities of the sparsely populated Northern Territory, "Kam", as she was known, had produced around 3,000 paintings by the time of her death in 1996, aged around 80 (her birthdate is "hazy").
Remarkably, all of them were made in her final decade. They are pictures that teem with life, patterns of dashes, or dots, in colour configurations that give the impression of individual marks dancing before the eyes. To us, they might look abstract – some bear a resemblance to the work of, say, Jackson Pollock – but everything she made was "firmly rooted in her ancestral lands", "an extension of cultural traditions specific to her people".
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