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DDH 1. Alalgura Awelye, Emily Kngwarreye, 1994, 120" x 48"

A pivotal painting in the oouvre of Emily Kngwarreye. Here lines have reappeared in the work, but this time above the field of soft dotting, rather than below it. This is not a grid of lines as in her earliest paintings but bold strokes as would be used to out line the breasts and shoulders of women for ceremony. She's dragged her brush across the surface of the painting highlighting the sensual field of reds and oranges and pinks in a veritable bush fire of brush strokes. Shortly after this painting the dots were to disappear from her work altogether replaced by patterned brush strokes. This was one of a small number of paintings that Emily signed on the front. The apocryphal story goes that having produced an edition of prints for which she had to sign a lot of Arches paper, Emily got it in mind that she had to sign everything that point on. She was soon disabused of this notion and consequently there are only a handful of Emilys signed on the front. Aboriginal people generally don't sign paintings, considering the proprietary subject matter of the iconography to be akin to a signature.