Emily’s style evolved directly from women’s ceremonial body-painting rituals, where specific markings are applied to the upper bodies using fingers or brushes dipped in desert ochres. In 1994, after Emily began working on paper, the profuse dotting and linear patterns of earlier years ceded to bold, austere black stripes on white. These soon evolved into rapidly applied linear markings on canvas in a crescendo of colours that evoke nature and earth.

Towards the end of her eight-year career, Emily had swiftly moved through several stylistic transitions. The early measured and precise layering of intense dotting morphed and changed, softening and merging until the dots disappeared altogether.

Before her last stylistic period of entwined painterly strokes, Emily had given in to her ageing body’s protests against the physically demanding practice of repetitive dotting. She revisited the more streamlined qualities of the line. The under-tracking of the yam roots characteristic of her early paintings returned as the singular focus.

Emily’s relationship with her medium and tools transformed at the end of her career and life. During this stylistic period, referred to as ‘Sacred Grasses’, her fist grips the brush tightly as she urgently pushes and pulls the paint.