Anooralya (Wild Yam Dreaming) Emily Karn Kngwarray, 1995

I originally thought that this painting was called “Wild Yarn Dreaming”, which would have been perfect, because Anne is all about knitting and yarn. Plus there is the subconscious component of this post. In fact, as of writing, she is knitting in public. So, whether it is stringy tubers or wool strings, either way it seemed an appropriate picture for this post and colorful too.

Anne pretty much had yesterday off. So, I sort of woke her up when I called home from work. She seemed perturbed when she answered the phone and since I was at the other end of the line, I felt that her annoyance was directed at me. As it turns out, when she put on her glasses, she found one of its temples missing. She asked me if I had seen it. I sort of felt accused. Instead, I suggested that maybe her glasses got broken after she fell asleep on the couch, but she replied that she had been reading and not falling asleep in front of the TV. I tried this redirection because I’ve been blamed for stuff while I was asleep before. Usually, my offensive actions occur in Anne’s dreams, which are always vivid and mostly strange. In these situations I’m left trying to defend myself, for something that I never did. Logically, she knows this too, but in these situations there is also the emotional component. Besides she can rationalize that I would have done whatever I did, if I really had the opportunity to do so. Anyway, she had the time to get the missing temple replaced and no monkey brain desserts or mine car rides were required.

Of Australian Aboriginal heritage, Emily Kam Kngwarray hailed from Utopia, Central Desert, Northern Territory. She was born in 1910 and passed a year after making this art, in 1996. The following is the Seattle Art Museum description of this painting:

A tangled tempest is moving underground. We are observing a network of yams that wind their way through the deep red sands of the artist’s homeland. The artist often led other women to look for this variety of yam, which grows in long tubers as thin as a pencil. Kngwarray was the “boss” or senior custodian, of the knowledge about where and when these yams would proliferate. The charismatic pull of her paintings can partly be explained by the fact that one can almost follow her physical effort, sitting on the ground and reaching across the canvas with a saturated brush, then pulling back to linger for only a moment before energetically stroking canvas once again.