Summer Seeds 1991

Emily Kame Kngwarreye made this beauty, Summer Seeds, with paint, I reckon, in the late 20th century sometime. You can just feel the process. There's this overall feeling of the colour red, like a summer heat haze, but then, when you look closer, you see the texture is actually made up of all these tiny dots. Like, if Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama had a baby. The dots aren't uniform, they're all different shapes and sizes, some are lighter, some are darker, and this gives the painting a real sense of movement and life. It feels like she's trying to capture the essence of something, not just the appearance of it. Kngwarreye has this way of suggesting infinity by focusing on the simplest mark and repeating it over and over. It makes me think of how art is just one big conversation, like all these artists talking to each other across time. Painting embraces ambiguity and multiple interpretations. What a gift!