ql-align-justify">Be advised, warns the 2008 introduction to a catalogue for an exhibition of her paintings, that this publication may contain the name of the artist, and there may be images of her. So reader, go no further if you may be shocked or offended, if this is the way of your meaning.

In accordance with her custom, our artist’s name must be suppressed after death. Images of her person are forbidden. Her powerful spectral presence, her meaning to the living, is now to be referenced in an effort never-to-forget by never naming, never picturing.

If you are from a place where the habit is to enumerate dates, this much is certain, she died on September2, 1996. But nobody knowsquite when she was born, perhaps 1910, because no-one in her lifeworld found enumeration to be meaningful. To the extent that her life is now at least roughly calculable, she was about 86 when she died. Of the place of birth and death of this artist, we know and can speak thus much without fear of offending custom: Utopia.

Utopia was the name given to a cattle station established in 1928 in the Australian desert, perhaps in a moment of white man’s irony. In this most marginal of agricultural land, the station was able to support only a few head of cattleper square mile. Those colonizers only ever half owned this land, having been granted the strangeproperty title of a “pastoral lease,” a rationalization of what at the time seemedto the authorities to be unstoppable theft.The property was sold to the Aboriginal Land Fund in 1976. About 1000 speakers of Anmatyerre live today on these, their ancestral lands, in family groups of 20 or 30 on outstations scattered across hundreds of square kilometers.

The artist we are writingabout started to paint at the age of 78, and in the last eight years of her life, she produced over 3000 canvases, approximately one per day in the calculation of her curators,for whom such calculation produces a result that is notable.

Hers was an “impossible modernism,” said Akira Tatehata, Director, National Museum of Art, Osaka, when an exhibition of her works toured there – this and an exhibition in Australia soon after were the reason for a 2008 catalogue where several art-historical luminaries speak to her work. Maybe she was “one of the twentiethcentury’s most important abstract artists,” or perhaps such an accolade is impossible for “a quintessential outsider.” She could neither read nor write,and only once or twice travelled beyondher placeof birth and death. Would that she were to “be accorded the legendary status granted to ... Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keefe,” says curator Margot Neale in her introduction to the catalogue. Her work is as like as it was unlike Monet and Pollock, resonating with “multiple modernisms,” perhaps abstract expressionism, or minimalism, or conceptualism, or the modernism

that is postmodernism?

But how so, when these movements are so completely alien to the artist? What gives anyone a right to ascribemeaning to another?Or in an ethnographic mode, should we try to work out what her meanings were, and so differently?

Now we’ve reached a point in our narrative where we can’t help ourselves but to transgress the painter’s protocols of meaning. If you are in a culture where you need to name the artist of a work, for the sake of its provenance, its “genius” (to take a word from the title of the catalogue), our commentators will, out of awkward cross-cultural necessity, give you an ofﬁcial artist’s name if not a “real” name: Emily Kame Kngwarreye. This may have been alteredas a mark of respect, the catalogue says, and besides, there are many spellings, even in this catalogue. It’s a “professional name,” created so her art can enter into the world of the market economy.There are also some photosof her, but discreetly placed near the back of the book, hence the page of warnings at the start.¹⁴

Before she began to paint,Emily Kame Kngwarreye already had thingsthat she had said, some of these secret and sacred“women’s business,” but these are only known by people who now cannot speak her name or view her likeness. She had sung these thingsin Anmatyerre, paintedthem onto her body, danced them with the other women.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye had been an elder, an owner of land deﬁned by its narrative focal points but without surveyedboundaries. Alhalkere was her “country,” anice usage in Aboriginal Englishbecause in dic-tionary English it connotesboth sovereignty of a certainkind and land-scape. We need to push this further than an ambiguityin English, because the people called Alhalkere were not just in or of a country of thatname, they were the countryAlhalkere. Not “property” – though that’s what Utopia stationhad been, “a property” – nor countryin the sense of a nation-space to which she belonged, but more a country that belonged the people. In English, we need to become ungrammatical, and even then,it is hard to get close to the meaning.Translation at a certain point fails us, though we can struggle to get closer by fumbling with qualiﬁcations.

Big Yam Dreaming is a giant canvas in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In the world where truth and property are mun-danely material,we are told that it is synthetic polymer on canvas,291.1 cm ×

801.8 cm. (As paintings go, it’s big; the enumeration to a decimalpoint of a centimeter is a modernabsurdity.) We’ll never be able to see this so long as it ison the wall of a gallery, but we are told that the following is inscribed in black ﬁber-tipped pen on the reverse:

959130 / Emily Kngwarreye / Commissioned by THE HOLT FAMILY/ OF DELMORE SPRINGS N.T. / 22/23/7/95

EM/EMILY¹⁵

Big Yam Dreaming wascompleted in two days in 1995, the year before she died, on July 22–23 according to the empirically fastidious, provenance-conscious notation on the back of the canvas. Two assistants had painted a black background. The canvas was laid out on the ground in an open-sided shelter shaded with corrugated iron, the dogs and ﬂies of the desert buzzing around. Emily sat cross-legged on the canvas, painting white lines from the middle of the canvas to the edge.

“I am Kame now,” Emily is said to have said, just one of the only dozen or so of her sentences that have been recorded in English. Kame is a desert yam, Emily’s totem. She was the yam, a creeper that spreads its shoots and roots across the cracked desert earth. When the tuber ripens, you can dig down into the cracks to locate the edible yam seeds. Harvesting is women’s work. From higher up, the Big Yam Dreaming might also be a map of the country. Or on another scale, the white lines on a black ground are the white ocher markings applied to black bodies for ceremony – though only such imagery as was publicly allowable, not sacred and secret meanings. Without this narrative, thepainting is just a beautiful mesh of white lines, just minimalism, and so to us moderns, just modernism, and also perhaps more.

In this book, when we talk about an object like Big Yam Dreaming, we are addressing meaning – the “grammar of multimodality”– at two levels. One is simply to make sense; the other is to make sense of our making sense. When grammar was just for sentences, we called the ﬁrst level of analysis“parsing.” In our multimodal grammar, we want to parse a world beyond the text.

Making sense of Big Yam Dreaming wehave:

Reference: yam, land, person,person, people (one of each, this,and in general).

Agency: the land speaks,the country belongs,the yam livesthe person, and more.

Structure: the shoots and roots of the yam creeper, painted lines, cracks in the desert soil, Anmatyerre language, Aboriginal English, and more.

Context: Alhalkere people, galleries, tradition, modernism, and more. Interest: the land to which Kame speaks, to connect with Emily, to address the politics of theft and the historical pain that Indigenous Peoples have endured and continue to endure, to make some

money, and more.

The “.. . and more” indicates that although these things may have become focal points of our attention based on our interest, meanings are inexhausti-ble. These are some of the distinguishable elements of a grammar of multi-modality, pointers to the kinds of work we need to do to begin to make sense of this image. If we are not Alhalkere, our viewing and talking will necessa-rily be different from Emily’s, and so require of us greater attention. Nevertheless, we do mean to connect with her. So, we parse the canvas; we parse our talking around the canvas; we parse the history of our meanings in relation to Emily’s.

If one level of analysis in the grammar of multimodality is to parse in order to make sense, another level is to make sense of our making sense. What are the meaningsof meanings? We must, of necessity, experience a disorientation because Emily’s and our frames of referenceare so different. We want to speak to the person of the artist and to envision her living, but we can’t have names or pictures for her. (We thought for a moment we might put a photo of her at meaningpatterns.net, the web slideshow that accompanies this book, because the National Museum’s catalogue does that, albeit with a warning,but we decided after a while that we shouldn’t.) Though we don’t reallybuy the “professional name” argument, we have used her name. To speak of an artist in the ways we know, we must at least to some extent transgress.

Then, if we dare to name, “Kame” isa person, is a plant,is the land, is a totem, and more. These are not mere metaphors,^§AS1.4.4a they are realer than that. And when the countrybelongs you, thereare not actives and passivesthat are found in our dichotomous ontology of acting and being acted upon.^§2.1.2 The more we work at our parsing, the more we get a sense that Emily’s meanings and ours are incommensurable. It is hard to grasp the differences when the meanings of the meanings might be so different. This is where our making sense beginsto fail us. But the difference is the point. Can we develop a grammar of the patterns of differing, rather than a grammar of similarity? What is the scope of human difference? What are the limits of our mutual understanding? Why do we have an interest in understandability? These are some of the questions we want to address in this book.

We have been back to Utopia a number of times, driving there across the thousand-odd kilometers of dirt trackthat by a modern reckoning is just a wobblyline in the desert from Mount Isa to Alice Springs. We were working with teachers in the schools to develop literacy as policy and practice in the training of Aboriginal teachers, in projects funded by the Australian Government.¹⁶ Little one-room schools have been set up at each of the out-stations on Utopia. But what was more strikingthan the writing– or, for a school, the fact that not much writing was happening – was the proliﬁc painting, on every surface, from the panels of wrecked cars to the walls of the school itself.

You can buy “Emilies” online at the Delmore Gallery. Because she is dead and famous you will have to contactthe gallery to ﬁnd out what they will cost.

Delmore Gallery represents a distinguished and talented list of emergingand acclaimed artists from Utopia ... Established by the Holt family in 1989, Delmore Gallerywas originally situated 250 kilometers northeast of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. The Holt’s property, Delmore Downs Station, bordered Utopia, a former cattle station that has been underthe management of its traditional owners since 1976, located very close to the exact centre of Australia. The Holt familyowned properties in this area, including Macdonald Downs, Dneiper, Delny and Delmore Downs since 1924. TheDelmore name on the back of a canvas is recognised as one of the best provenances available. FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE. Copyright © 2017 Delmore Gallery. Powered by Shopify.¹⁷

---

¹⁴ Margot Neale, ed., 2008,Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Canberra, Australia:

National Museumof Australia Press,pp. 11, 31, 13, 16, 25.

¹⁵ www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/57498

¹⁶ Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Nicky Solomon, Allan Luke, Bob Morgan, and Martin Nakata, 1994, “Batchelor College Entry Proﬁle and Stage Level Assessment Scales,” Batchelor, NT: Batchelor College; Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Michael McDaniel, Sue McGinty, Martin Nakata, Ailsa Purdon, Nicky Solomon, and Ron Stanton, 1995, “Assessment and Access to Adult Literacy Programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People Wishing to Participate in Vocational Educationand Training,” Canberra: Department of Employment, Education and Training; Bill Cope, 1998, “The Language of Forgetting: A Short History of the Word,” pp.192–223 in Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, edited by M. Fraser, Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp.6-11.

§MS0.0a Big Yam Dreaming, By an Artist We Don’t (at First) Name