Batik

Golden lines twist and cross over deep reds and browns in this 1990 piece by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of Australia's most respected Aboriginal artists. The busy surface, packed with dots and threading marks, comes straight from her years working with batik alongside the women of Utopia, a remote community in the Northern Territory. Batik is a way of decorating fabric using wax and dye, built up slowly layer by layer, and you can see that patient, repeated approach echoed all across this work.

Emily's story is remarkable because she only began painting on canvas when she was almost 80, then produced thousands of works in the years that followed. Her imagery grew out of the country she knew by heart and her Dreaming stories, especially the yam plant with its roots spreading through the earth. The tangle of gold here reads almost like an aerial view of the desert, or the secret network of plant life hidden underground.

Rather than following a neat plan, the marks wander and repeat with a rhythm all their own, giving the whole thing a warm, restless energy. Batik like this was really the starting point of her celebrated career, a quiet record of land, season, and memory that shows exactly where her extraordinary journey began.