Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s magnificent oeuvre is a collective expression of the interconnectedness of her physical self and Country, (Alhalkere), as well as the metaphysical associations of Awelye (women’s law ceremonies in Anmatyerre) and attendant custodial responsibilities for nurturing the land and its bounty. This fusion is evident in her own naming: Kngwarreye’s (private one) and her personal or ‘bush’ name, Kame, the seed of the wild pencil yam, Anwerlarr (Vigna lanceolata), that grows across Alhalkere. In Kngwarreye’s visual language, her paintings are therefore glorious manifestations of Country, Alhalkere, and self, Awelye—or as she put it, ’the whole lot’ —a concept that was ever present in her work, across all styles and periods.

Exploring the connections and linkages between the artist’s first works in batik in 1977 and her last paintings in 1996 formed the basis of Margo Neale’s curatorial rationale in the first retrospective in 1998. Revealing ‘lines of continuity that reverberate’ across Kngwarreye’s oeuvre, Neale proclaimed the artist’s stylistic virtuosity as ‘shifting gears in a continuous trajectory linking time, place and image’. To illustrate this synopsis, Neale quoted T.S. Eliot’s poetic existential summation: ‘In my beginning is my end … In my end is my beginning.’

According to accompanying documentation, the present grand scale painting Awelye (also known as Awelye - My Story and Emily's Story, 1996), was commissioned by a family ‘who had lived on Utopia and had known Emily all their life’. When she had almost completed the work, Emily looked up and gestured over the faintly obscured dark image to the right of the painting saying: 'This me, all finish now’. Then, gesturing to the left side of the painting, she added, ‘this [is] my life—over now.’ This revisionist practice is well documented. Janet Holt believes that in the early months of 1996, Kngwarreye took on commissions executed in earlier styles ‘in the spirit of reviewing her life’s work.’ Awelye, recalls works produced in 1992-1993, among her most popular, exhibiting a similar range and approach, with brushwork that shows the artist’s signature frontal dumping technique. It also reverberates with other mark making that echoes the directional impressions left in sand paintings from the movement of fingers pushing into earth. This coalescence stems from a developmental period in 1991, when Kngwarreye produced a large painting with layers of dotting applied in a new expressive manner compared to the more highly controlled dotting of her previous works. These ‘larger, pixelated’ dots varied in direction, shape, size and tonal make-up across the canvas field, and marked the beginning of what became generally known as Kngwarreye’s impressionistic floral works. Described by Perkins and Cole as ‘evoking blossoms in a time of seasonal change’, the 1991 painting coincides with the expansion of the artist’s toolbox of materials and technical approach, wherein a range of brushes were trimmed to achieve specific painterly effects.

Margot Neale has declared Awelye to be Kngwarreye’s visual theory, outside the lexicon of modernist art critics, who see her as ‘one of the twentieth century’s most important abstract painters’.