Emily Kame Kngwarreye, circa 1910-1996, EDUNGA,

synthetic polymer paint on canvas  
bears artist's name and number OG18 on edge of canvas  
95 BY 126.7CM  

Provenance: 
Painted at Utopia, Alice Springs in early 1990 
Delmore Gallery via Alice Springs 
Donald Kahn Collection  

Exhibited: 
Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Donald Kahn, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Florida, 1991; Carolino Augusteum Museum, Salzburg, The Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Naprstkovo Museum, Prague and The Museum of Ethnology, Warsaw during 1992-1993 
Dreamings - Tjukurrpa: Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, The Donald Kahn Collection, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 26 July-16 October 1994
Australian Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert- The Donald Kahn Collection, Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh, 3 December 1994-28 January 1995 
Desert Dreaming: Australian Aboriginal Art, Albertina, Vienna, 15 June - 26 August 2007

Literature: 
Geoffrey Bardon and Vivien Johnson, Australian Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Donald Kahn, Miami: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, 1991, p.49, cat.no.18 (iIlus.), p.76 
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker (ed.),  Dreamings - Tjukurrpa: Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, The Donald Kahn Collection, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1994, p.35, cat.no.18 (black and white illus.), pp.106-107 (colour illus.)

Cf. For paintings from the same year that feature a striped border, see Awelye, 1989, in the collection of Anthony and Beverley Knight, and Wild Orange Dreaming, 1989, in the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, in Margo Neale (ed.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Paintings from Utopia, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery and MacMillan, 1998, p.67, pl.35, catalogue number 10, and p.71, plate 39, catalogue number 9, respectively, illus; Jennifer Isaacs et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998, p.53, pl.10, cat no. 0L07 (illus.) for a  similar example titled, Emu All Over.
 
The stripes of colour along the edges of the canvases appeared in most of the paintings in Kngwarreye's first solo exhibition at Utopia Art Sydney in 1990. The design relates to body painting marks and has its precursor in a number of batiks the artist made in the 1980s; see, for example, the striped border in Emu Dreaming, 1987/88, in the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, in Neale 1998, p.66, plate 34, catalogue number 3. In these cases the design element is part of the composition: in other works the stripes are painted along the sides of the stretched canvas, a practice that Kngwarreye discontinued in mid-1990, with a brief reprise in 1993 (P. Hodges in Neale 1998, p.36 and p.38). The allusion to body paintings is a recurring theme in Emily's work, and finds its full blown expression as the subject of the sparse linear paintings made in the last years of her life, from 1993 to 1996.