Press// Quotes// Texts

'Consent not to be a single being' (Édouard Glissant by way of Fred Moten)

choral choreo choro choros chorus corale coral spin weave whirl dance

Emma McNally

Lives and works in London

University of York

MA Political Philosophy University of York

BA English/Philosophy

Stephanie Rosenthal

Director, Berlin’s Martin-Gropius Bau

(Previously Chief Curator at Hayward Gallery London, Artistic Director 20th Biennale of Sydney)

"Emma McNally’s drawings suggest maps or charts of things as complex and various as seas, the night sky, military bases, computer circuit boards, flight paths. They also evoke aerial photographs, radar screens and experimental musical scores. Yet though her drawings chime with both the real and the virtual world, they all come from the imagination. If they were charts, they would map a mindscape.

For her drawing series "Choral Fields" Emma McNally covers vast expanses of empty space with tracks, traces, ruled lines, hammered dots, smudges, scratches, scribbling – thousands of marks that swarm, buzz, vibrate, hum , clump together and drift apart. Her mark-making can be percussive or gestural, violent or quietly lyrical. She invents new ways of using graphite

and carbon, and uses sandpaper as an eraser, sometimes simultaneously applying graphite with one hand and rubbing the markings away with the other.

The title suggests both music and a field of activity or vision and relates also to the philosophical idea of the chora , a peripheral space in which forms materialise.

Choral Fields was one of the core works for the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Installed in a building on the top of Cockatoo Island it felt surrounded by water which resonated in an ideal way with the way the drawings came into being. The first six drawings were created in a studio space at West India Docks - a place where water, boats, traffic, planes, telecommunications, banking, and glass-and-steel skyscrapers converge. The drawings echo the pulsing rhythms of the city and reflect the river’s ebb and flow. They are created from carbon – basic ‘matter’ which, like water, is vital for our existence.”

Richard Deacon

Artist / Curator of ‘Abstract Drawing’ at Drawing Room, London. The coming alive of material:

'If these artists in the Malevich camp work with the rules, the inheritors of Af Klint do not. They respond.. Hesse, marooned in an abandoned factory in Düsseldorf during her miraculous year of 1965, converted the very detritus that surrounded her into the most extraordinary wall reliefs and hanging sculptures. The slew of drawings that came out of that year – sparse, linear and deeply strange – have the same quality of asking ‘Just what is this and where does it come from?’, the coming alive of material.

For Emma McNally, that coming alive is evidenced through trace, record, pulse, echo, reverberation, resonance, track, scratch, hiss and stutter; all leave their mark behind and the process of drawing is a kind of index of the ways in which the unseen, the unknown, the deep and the distant are registered on the surface. She is an instrument and the drawing is what the instrument produces or plots.'

Tom McCarthy:

‘McNally's drawings are never simply representational, but rather seek, through their deployment of the codes at play in such diverse disciplines as cartography, musical notation, aerial surveillance and astronomy, to engage with and lay bare the very possibility of representation. In many of them, we could be looking at a visual rendering of sound waves, or a polygraph test printout, or a chart showing the nodes and relays of the internet, or a surface (of metal, or earth, for example) blasted by some catastrophe – or all, or none, of the above. The ambiguity itself is what is so seductive and compelling. In many respects, we could think of her as picking up a baton handed down by the likes of El Lissitzky, the Constructivists and so on’.

Kate Mcfarlane

Co Director of Drawing Room, London:

Emma McNally demonstrates a deep commitment to the medium of drawing, pushing herself and her materials to extremes to create dense fields, charged with the energy of contemporary life. The miasma of lines and marks mirror the abstract systems that rule our lives, confounding and enriching in equal measure. Carbon, her material of choice, proves highly adaptable, capable both of building opacity and of exposing her paper substrate. As we contemplate her drawings we enter a zone of resistance and of contagion, and we’re caught up in the energy of artistic production. Operating on both a macro and a micro level all of life is in these drawings which trigger a synesthetic response – in the marks we feel the deep hum of drones and we detect the touch of the artist. In turns attacking and caressing the paper, McNally exploits the full range of mark-making of which carefully chosen materials are capable.

Mary Doyle

Director, The Drawing Room, London:

On first impression Emma McNally’s huge scale drawings might be compared to mappings of constellations, or an ordinance survey of some landmass or sonar reading. They appear to be the result of scientific readings or an outcome of mathematical research, but are made very intuitively, creating a dynamic visual score similar to soundscapes. Looking closer the works are made up of repeated marks, crosses, dashes and dots and traces of lines that converge to create a matrix of activity. This activity implies a force field containing geometric spaces and areas of frenetic energy that spiral and spin off into a void-like space.

McNally works very intensely, often working on a large drawing over many months. Her drawings are much like writing or a musical score made up of a vocabulary of signs and symbols that create a state of balance and flux. McNally has a singular approach to making work and her focus on drawing is especially intriguing for its quasi-scientific yet extremely intuitive approach. Underlying is a metaphysical and philosophical approach, yet they are very much about the physicality of making itself.

Adam Greenfield

Author of ‘Radical Technologies’ ‘Against The Smart City’ and ‘Everyware’:

I was smitten dumb by Emma McNally's drawings the very moment I laid eyes on them. Very, very few images — and certainly none at all that are static — have ever captured quite as well for me what it feels like to live in the world in this moment. Coming into view of one of her large-format pieces is like the onset of some enormous music. From half a room away you feel the surge of power through sharply-inscribed meridians; as you draw closer, their intense physicality resolves in detail. Lines of force flex and shudder around dark attractors, particles of unlight swarm and coalesce, decisions made elsewhere and -when fold back against our

bodies in the here and now. I'm still not sure via what magick it is that she translates all of this onto the picture plane, but there it is.

Baptiste Lanaspeze

founder of Editions Wildproject www.wildproject.org:

As a publishing house devoted to ecological humanities, we published for our 10-year anniversary a book that tried to ‘map’ the issues, authors and references of the French ecological thought in development. We needed inside the book a leitmotiv visual work that could give shape to the complexity of this lively galaxy in full blooming – something organic, systemic, crafted, beautiful, dramatic, map-like and dream-like, ambiguous. We found it nowhere – but in Emma McNally’s drawings.

Curtis Roads

Author Composing Electronic Music (OUP) Microsound (MIT) The Computer Music Tutorial (MIT)

Musical Sign Processing (Routledge) Foundations of Computer Music (MIT)

Former chair and current vice chair of the Media Arts & Technology, University of California, Santa Barbara:

The artist Emma McNally pursues an aesthetic direction that closely aligns to the ideas described in my book Microsound (MIT Press) and my music

POINT LINE CLOUD (Asphodel). In this work, the sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line, and cloud emerge as the density of tiny sonic sound grains increases. Sparse emissions produce rhythmic patterns. By lining up the grains in rapid succession, one can induce an illusion of tone continuity or pitch. As the grains meander, they flow into streams and rivulets. Dense agglomerations of grains form clouds of sound whose shapes evolve over time.

These complex processes of detailed pattern formation find a direct echo in Emma McNally's brilliant and evocative visual art works.

Manuel Lima

Author, lecturer, and researcher is a leading voice on information visualisation and the founder of

Visualcomplexity.com

Author of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“the man who turns data into art” (Wired Magazine)

“the Edward Tufte of the 21st Century” (Creativity Magazine):

‘I first became aware of Emma McNally when I was researching for my latest book ‘Visual Complexity’... McNally’s work was the perfect complement to a chapter entitled ‘Complex Beauty’ when I investigate the beginning of a new movement in art which I call ‘networkism’ .. work influenced by recent developments in network science and information visualisation. As one of the main precursors of the movement, McNally’s work is featured prominently in the chapter and has enriched the book in a remarkable way.Networkism is a growing trend, characterised by the portrayal of figurative graph structures – illustrations of network topologies revealing convoluted patterns of nodes and links... (McNally’s) cartographic conjectures...expose astonishing landscapes of intense graphite depicting fictitious networks, paths and trajectories that resemble geological maps, oceanic charts, black holes or molecular structures...’

Henry Somers-Hall

Author ‘Hegel, Deleuze and the Critique of Representation’ (SUNY 2012)

Co-editor of ‘The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze’ (Cambridge University Press, 2012):

‘We can say of McNally’s work that it is beautiful, both in the intuitive sense of eliciting pleasure, as well as in the technical sense of figuring the structure of our reason, albeit with the understanding of reason as processual, relational, and non-representational that has emerged as central to the paradigm of post-war European philosophy.

McNally's work exhibits a carefully constructed attempt to portray essence not as substance, through the subject of a work or by the introduction of archetypes, but rather as the result of a process of reciprocal determination, where individual lines, markings, and trajectories are brought to significance through their interrelations with those around them. In this sense, McNally's work exemplifies aesthetically the revolution initiated in philosophy by Gilles Deleuze (and his later collaborations with Guattari) towards a rhizomatic or diagrammatic image of thinking.... McNally sets out a novel trajectory that allows for thinking beyond the irony and skepticism of the postmodern. McNally’s cartographies are, to use a characterisation of Proust’s, in this sense 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.' As such, they allow us to see that the attempt to think beyond representation to reconcile process, genesis and structure is not merely an abstract intellectual possibility, but a concrete, coherent and above all real project, productive of works of both philosophical and aesthetic merit. ‘

Jose Alfredo Ramirez Director Groundlab Ltd

Co director Landscape Urbanism Graduate Programme at Architectural Association Director Architectural Association Mexico Visiting School:

‘In Landscape Urbanism Graduate Programme at the Architectural Association we are very interested in the way we represent the world around us through drawings and maps. As architects we develop projects that can produce positive changes to contemporary conditions. Because of this we are constantly looking to other disciplines and professions that can teach us new and inspiring ways to achieve this. This is the case of Emma McNally, who has contributed to the Landscape Urbanism Lecture and seminar series in the past year by sharing with us her work, methodology and vision about maps and drawings: what they can do and how they can open the new possibilities for the future. She has a very special relation with a specific material to produce drawings/maps, carbon, and this has been an eye opener for students who have realised the importance of technique and material to achieve a style and a point of view to give voice to their minds. Her speculations in paper open up new paths to represent the dynamism and temporal aspects of our complex world .’

Francisco Lopez

‘internationally recognised as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene.’:

‘Despite being in contact with a large number of visual artists and being familiar with many contemporary artistic manifestations, I have rarely come across an artist like McNally for generating a profound, complex and self-contained world with such simple means. I take this to be an extremely valuable skill, particularly in the tech-savvy and highly sophisticated climate we live in with technological implementations of all kinds in the domain of art.’

Contemporary Art Society:

‘Emma McNally’s drawing, Carbon Cleaving , brings different ways of describing space together: cartographies, technological spaces, telecommunications, flight paths, tracks and transmissions. The materials used to create these spaces of transformation include paper, graphite, chalk, tissue and holes and metal pins that impregnate the soft paper surface. She writes: ‘I like graphite’s materiality: its mess and dirt as well as its capacity to leave the cleanest, sharpest percussive marks and lines. I feel like I’m forging land formations when I use it, or scattering particles, or spiralling vortices of smoke and water’. Her large drawings point the viewer to a different universe while the small drawings act as charts providing clues and direction.’

Elton Barker:

Editor: New Worlds From Old Texts (Oxford University Press)

‘The image I wanted, then, needed to respect these different disciplinary approaches while at the same time hinting at ways in which they might be combined and intertwined (for interdisciplinary research). And, of course, it needed to be in some way spatial, to suggest the complexity of trying to represent and unpick spatial entities and relations. Richard Rowley of Agile Collective put me on to London-based artist Emma McNally, whose work attempts to “portray essence not as substance... but rather as the result of a process of reciprocal determination, where individual lines, markings, and trajectories are brought to significance through their interrelations with those around them.” After getting her approval, I chose her scratches, traces, spaces . This work on graphite (“a medium that lends itself perfectly to [a] sort of rhythmic making and unmaking. It is a material for palimpsest”: ibid) seemed to me to perfectly capture the spatial palimpsests that many of us were striving to reveal and more closely examine in our texts, while also being provocatively new and overtly relational. Emma later informed me that the very same artwork was used by Ridley Scott as a navigation map in his latest Alien prequel Covenant. If it’s good enough for Ridley...!’

Selected press:

20th Sydney Biennale: ‘Contemporary Art meets Sci Fi’ The Guardian, UK

‘..With some stunning large scale video works, such as Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Painting with History ... (2015), in the main building and exquisite drawings of imaginary maps by Emma McNally tucked away on the top of the island, I walked back to the ferry on a high: this was starting to feel like the best biennale in years..’

Adrian Searle : Abstract Drawing (curated by Richard Deacon for Drawing Room London) The Guardian UK

‘..Some drawings here are like places: Emma McNally's huge black work engulfs the viewer in darkness. Amorphous voids loom. Get up close and what looks like spatter resolves into thousands of perfect circles and jangling repetitive marks, all subsumed in a kind of darkness. You can really lose yourself here. Maybe the artist is trying to lose herself, too.’

The Times UK

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London)

'Emma McNally's stunning large scale drawings of what seem to be astral charts or obscure musical notation (but aren't) are gorgeous'

London Calling. Sue Hubbard

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London)

‘..Amongst this collection of .. work is Emma McNally’s intense and beautiful Choral Fields 1 6 (2014) in graphite on paper. The title suggests both music and a field of vision or activity. Inventing new ways of using graphite and carbon, which she erases with sandpaper, she creates drawings that allude to space and the microscope, to navigational charts and the stars, in work that is both tense and gestural, muscular yet lyrical.’

Artforum: 500 words (as told to Himali Singh Soin

I THINK OF THESE DRAWINGS as fugitive, heterogeneous grey areas. They are the turbulence between noise and signal. They are a space of difference and deferral, a weather system of graphite. They are also broadband realms where signals at multiple frequencies are being transmitted and received—including those not usually within our “range”: sonar, ultraviolet, the very fast and the very slow. I’m constantly trying to disrupt the figure-ground relationship to make blurred areas where the conditions of focusing are undone.

I mine all sorts of ways of thinking visually about space and time: the spiral paths of particles in bubble chambers, which are infinitely fast and small; images of cellular mitochondria; the Hubble Deep Field images that probe deep time, where all time is held in the surface of the image but can’t be reached. I like looking at images that show fleeting events and images of aerial views of cities at night—all the emergent formations at a macro scale that look like deep-sea organisms in the dark water. I also love aerial images of airports, both in use and obsolete, as well as the Nazca Lines.

I constantly listen to sound when I draw—the white noise of rainfall; field recordings from all environments; the humming and buzzing of Francisco López’s album Buildings [New York]; the transmissions from the hydrophones under the Antarctic ice, streamed live on the Internet; as well as all kinds of music. I try to attend as closely as possible to the sound, and to transcribe the rhythms into the drawing, to make a sort of seismograph. Marks that are suggestive of the airborne or the sub-oceanic, for example, can come into relation with marks, lines, traces, and paths suggestive of circuitry, telecommunications, Morse code, molecules, stars, shoals, electronic pulses, particles, networks. These sorts of “readings” are at the center of my drawings.

Graphite is a medium that lends itself perfectly to this practice of rhythmic making and unmaking. The dense graphite areas act as engines in the drawing, emitting dark signals of loss, desire, longing, separation, reaching—they are the material “heat.” I also like to think of carbon—a material that is both an insulator and a conductor—in different states: coal, diamond, smoke, black oil; as well as water in all its states: ice, snow, mist, rain, vapor. I want the works to be humming graphite sound-fields: vibratory, oscillatory, multi-voiced assertions and hesitations, yet also full of silences, voids, ghosts, residues, and remainders.

Apollo Magazine

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London)

‘ ..The best pieces in ‘Mirrorcity’ are those with no obvious digital components whatsoever. Emma McNally’s large scale drawings, which surround you as you walk into the room, are simultaneously overwhelming and subtle. They bring to mind nautical charts, the view from a plane through clouds, a map of stars, or maybe even a piece of music. McNally has described her work as a form of ‘visual thinking around questions of emergence’, intuitively creating a code like visual language that one imagines could be read with the right machine..’

Mostly Film

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward, London)

'An unexpected high point for me was a series of drawings by Emma McNally enclosed in a space within a space and seeming to make sense of some indefinable space; here fiction, reality, order and chaos seem to coexist happily. Effectively mapping fictional spaces these works do, in a quiet, contemplative way, what the exhibition as a whole seems to be setting out to achieve; here, at least, the notion of a multi-faceted space feels relevant.'

The London Economic

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward, London)

'Other notable pieces include the drawings of both Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq (Black Hole) and Emma McNally. This entire section of the exhibition was well curated, showcasing work by artists who used simple and traditional techniques like charcoal drawings and paper cutting (John Stezaker) to tap into the confused places between fiction and reality in a digital world. The Emma McNally drawings displayed her usual diligence and emotion in her handling of graphite – a room full of imagined maps of dark nautical places was a beautiful, quiet intermission to the exhibition.'

Seed Creative Network

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London)

'There are two artists whose drawings at Mirrocity are both elegantly detailed and subtly overpowering. One of which is Emma McNally’s Choral Fields 1-6. Her large-scale graphite drawings are meticulously drawn with subjects from as small as circuit boards to as large as flight paths. Impressive as they are, all of McNally’s drawings come from her imagination.' “They are created from carbon – basic ‘matter’ which, like water, is vital for our existence.” The other impressive drawing at Mirrorcity is Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq’s Black Hole III. Like Emma McNally’s drawings Ashfaq’s are made with graphite but used in a much more precise and less fluid manner. His work takes geometric forms and is influenced by meditations on light and its absence. Starting from one central point each line is individually and precisely drawn to make the whole of the geometric shape, with no room for the white fabriano to show behind.

Culture24

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London):

'Emma McNally’s large cartographic landscapes, their black and white fields comprised of lines of longitude and latitude, random coordinates, and criss-crossed with nodes and networks, seem to map the abstractions of mindscapes as well as the city’s physical contours.' Planned Violence

'Emma McNally is another artist whose head you feel you could climb inside. Her large scale drawings recall naval charts, air traffic displays, cartographic surveys, but they are in fact fictions - ‘mindscapes’, as the notes would have it. The results are epic and sweeping interiors which must take heroic levels of introversion to produce. Visitors can lose themselves here.

Artlyst

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London)

'Next door to the Stezaker collection, Emma McNally’s large-scale monochrome works in pencil and charcoal, Choral Fields 1-6, hover somewhere between architectural drawing and abstract expressionism. Placed together in a darkened room, these works have a strangely brooding effect, the crisp architectural lines blurring in and out of clouds of dark charcoal that threaten, and at times succeed, in overwhelming them. According to McNally, the images ‘suggest both music and a field of activity or vision ... a peripheral space in which forms materialise.’ She also cites the ‘philosophical idea of the “chora”,’ about which I know nothing at all, but is apparently a reference to a term described by Plato as meaning ‘a space ... the milieu in which forms materialise.’

Actually, McNally’s presence in the exhibition is unusual in that she is a philosophy graduate, as opposed to having gone the usual art college route.. In fact, further research online reveals that she is a ‘self-taught’ artist – all the more surprising given the powerfully conceptual nature of her work, and the skill with which it is realised.'

Artefact

Review: Mirrorcity (Hayward Gallery, London)

'Emma Mcnally’s graphite Abstract Map Drawings look like maps and grids which could be seen to reflect the chaos of 21st-century life in London.'

This is Tomorrow:

Review: ‘Mirrorcity, Hayward Gallery’

‘..Drawing is further brought to life by Emma McNally’s ‘Choral Fields 1 6’ (2014), which resoundingly embraces drawing as a verb rather than a noun. Six large graphite drawings undertake far more than a figurative facsimile of the visually perceptible. McNally’s drawings seem to depict sound waves, invisible electronic pulses and other networks not perceptible to the purely visual realm..’

Archinect: ‘Drawing/ space’

‘ Even at first glance, McNally's silver-beaded wire sculptures and graphite drawings resemble constellations in the night sky or maps, while other paperfolding pieces look like geological forms. There's no doubt her interests in philosophy, science, and music influence the intuitive, cartographic quality of her work...

Attempting to interrogate the virtual/actual distinction... She is interested in continually pushing spatial thinking into a grey area of complexity, hybridity and transformation.’

The Conversation Australia ‘A Surprising Spectacle..’:

Review 20th Biennale of Sydney:

‘..The Anglo Indian artist, Bharti Kher, in her ‘Six Women’, presents life size, plaster casts of six naked New Delhi sex workers, who confront the beholder with disarming honesty. And there is a wonderful mysterious silence in the work of the English artist, Emma McNally, and her study in fine graphite drawing.’

Vice: The Creators Project:

20th Biennale of Sydney

‘Graphite Drawings Depict City Grids, Flight Paths, and Data Flow..’:

‘..Fly over a city at night, and the dense network of lights look like the sky’s constellations, miniaturised and mapped onto Earth’s topography, or circuit boards magnified and illuminated. London based artist Emma McNally evokes these visible pathways, as well as the more invisible ones like data flow and flight paths, in her intricate, machine like drawings. McNally will show Choral Fields 1 12, an ongoing series of these graphite (carbon) drawings, which at the the upcoming 20th Biennale of Sydney..’

Art Monthly

Review of ‘Fields Charts Soundings’ T1+2 Artspace (Peter Suchin):

‘In the scholarly essay accompanying Emma McNally's 'Fields, Charts, Soundings' at T1+2 Artspace, Ana Balona de Oliveira provides a list of possible readings of McNally's drawings. They may be, she suggests, perceived as 'aerial views, battlefield maps, geological formations, oceanic charts, disease transmissions, animal migratory routes, molecule structures [or] black holes'. The sentence in fact ends with an 'etc', leaving the list of potential perceptions of the work open to further elaboration. De Oliveira is right to emphasise the polysemic aspect of these complicated, energetic drawings. But though one's initial impression may be of maps or other kinds of compressed or abstracted informational forms, in the end these works are fully independent of the types of object they superficially resemble...McNally does not restrict herself to the markings of carbon lead. It is possible to detect parts of the works where the paper has been folded over then flattened out, or where she has cut into the drawing, emphasising the work as made thing. At a time when so many artists glorify inanity and ease of execution, such labour – put to such attractive and intelligent ends – is almost shocking to see. It is certainly a desirable disturbance.’ Fine Print (Australia. 2016) ..With each work, there’s a sense of being drawn in. As you move closer, the detail and intricacies hint at the complexity of the artist’s practice, the layers of meaning and formula underpinning her world and ours. Etched out in perfect detail across the page there emerges order and structure. Radars, aerial maps, coding and charts transpire from beneath the shadow, a confusing mess of fact that is the architecture of each piece. To step back is to lose sight of the order, to be swept up in the emotion. It’s hard to believe the same lines make up the whole. Inky mountains and an ominous night sky clouding over in parts, the pieces loom over the viewer. There’s a wonderful sense of movement, of being taken by the weather and storm of each piece, taken by nature. It is the balance of McNally’s works that allows them to sing. They are considered, both a conscious exploration of the parts that make the whole and a study of the space between.

Art Agenda Australia:

Review of 20th Biennale of Sydney:

’At the Embassy of the Real on Cockatoo Island, old media provide compelling figures of the saturation of our contemporary reality by information and imagery, in Maaike Schoorel’s subtle, barely figurative oils (as in Diver, 2015), that seem to find site related imagery (indexed by a table of online research printouts) in the decaying walls of the rooms they were painted for, and Emma McNally’s large graphite drawings (the series “Choral Fields,” 2014 16) that create complex, brooding charts out of reference less marks..’

Art Guides Australia:

Review of 20th Biennale of Sydney:

‘The cartographic drawings of Emma McNally, installed in a room that recalls its military usage, are also a highlight, their chaotic but beguilingly detailed surfaces occupying a space very much between the physical world and our perpetual representations.’

Artistic Immunity/ The Monthly Australia:

Review of 20th Biennale of Sydney:

‘..Elsewhere on the island, Londoner Emma McNally’s commanding charcoal drawings float above the harbour in a room filled with natural light: landfall meets schematics in a series of perfectly sited mindscapes.

Texts

'McNally's work exhibits a carefully constructed attempt to portray essence not as substance, through the subject of a work or by the introduction of archetypes, but rather as the result of a process of reciprocal determination, where individual lines, markings, and trajectories are brought to significance through their interrelations with those around them. In this sense, McNally's work exemplifies aesthetically the revolution initiated in philosophy by Gilles Deleuze (and his later collaborations with Guattari) towards a rhizomatic or diagrammatic image of thinking. Presenting what we might describe as a figuration of forces rather than of things,

McNally's work at once both points to the singularity of the processes encountered in the world through a keen sense of the relative position of traces on the canvas and the particularity of graphite as a medium, whilst also developing a schematics of process which, precisely because it eschews direct reference to any particular system, hints at a coherence of process at work in divergent structures. In this sense, it presents aesthetically the priority of relation over subject that has dominated the structuralist and post-structuralist movements in philosophy. In showing that the rejection of representational figuration does not lead to chaos or arbitrariness, but to a new kind of ordering, McNally sets out a novel trajectory that allows for thinking beyond the irony and skepticism of the postmodern.

McNally’s cartographies are, to use a characterisation of Proust’s, in this sense 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.' As such, they allow us to see that the attempt to think beyond representation to reconcile process, genesis and structure is not merely an abstract intellectual possibility, but a concrete, coherent and above all real project, productive of works of both philosophical and aesthetic merit.

Finally, we can say of McNally’s work that it is beautiful, both in the intuitive sense of eliciting pleasure, as well as in the technical sense of figuring the structure of our reason, albeit with the understanding of reason as processual, relational, and non-representational that has emerged as central to the paradigm of post-war European philosophy.'

Imagine that the history of the world dates from the day when there was an encounter of two atoms, where two vortices, two chemical dances combine.

Paul Cézanne to Joachim Gasquet

When considering McNally’s work, an analogy can be made between experimental art and experimental science. In the late 1890s C.T.R Wilson built a chamber in order to reproduce atmospheric phenomena of the real world – clouds – in the laboratory. But fellow scientists working alongside Wilson observed something other than artificial clouds in his chamber. Visible in the condensation produced there were the tracks of real, very small things that had never been observed before – sub-atomic particles. This transformation of the meteorologist’s cloud chamber into the physicist’s bubble chamber has been described as a change from experimentation that mimics nature to one that takes nature apart.

McNally describes her drawings as chambers. In them she tracks basic connections in matter. Waves of forces play out through time and this 'time' is compressed into each drawing and each drawing becomes the trace of this ‘time’, a footprint suggesting that something was once present, or felt, or otherwise important. In the main work in this exhibition, Field 4, McNally seeks to create a sort of non-hierarchic multiple 'space', with no stable or definable boundaries, incorporating the micro-cosmos of the atom and the macro-cosmos of the star formation in a complex junction, intersection or spatial hybrid. Enfolding and unfurling, humming composite polyrhythmic spaces emerge from the different percussive rhythms and organisations of marks that McNally lays down.

McNally works with different forms of graphite and the multi-layered relevance of carbon is very important to the making of her work and to its meaning. Carbon is an essential element in the make up of individual human bodies and of the universe. It has a unique ability to bond with other atoms and can be an excellent conductor of heat and electricity in one form, and an insulator in another. For McNally, using graphite allows for a sort of material entanglement, or intertwining, of the 'self' and the 'world', echoing the idea inherent to phenomenology that to be is to be in the world. The constant erasures and rubbings out in her working method are a form of continual transforming and becoming - a combining or knotting in of the self and the world where everything is radically relational and in a constant state of shifting dynamic.

- Andrew Mummery

_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+

FIELDS CHARTS SOUNDINGS

'(tracing) additional courses over spaces that

before were blank/..threading a maze of currents

and eddies..'(Melville)

'field'

the range of any series of actions or energies

region of space in which forces are at work: the

locality of a battle: the battle itself: a wide

expanse: the area visible to an observer at one time:

a system or collection.

'chart'

a marine or hydrographical map exhibiting part of the

sea or other water with the islands, contiguous

coasts, soundings, currents etc: an outline map,curve,

or a tabular statement giving information of

any kind.

'sounding'

to measure the depth of; to probe: to try to discover

the inclinations, thoughts etc. to take soundings:

to dive deep, as a whale.

In Emma McNally's work dense layers of carbon* on

paper create fields which offer themselves up to

meaning: planes, vectors, topoi are overlaid, or

coexist with swarms, shoals, marks laid out in

rhythmic sequence.

The effect is of a continuous flux formed by a

congruence of information systems: neural networks,

contagion maps, sonar soundings, weathers systems,

water currents, charts plotting the migratory habits

of deep-ocean mammals.

Focusing on rhythm as an expression of the dynamic

of forming/unforming, McNally thinks this through

graphically by highly charged percussive mark-making.

Lines carry force, like the pulse of an ECG or a

measure of seismic activity.

Ways in which the 'matter' or 'noise' of charged

marks (unclaimed by frequencies or channels) combine,

disperse and recombine into gatherings of static are

explored. Passage is forged between differing

rhythmic expressions: highly regularised, geometric

systems of marks enter into configurations with

chaotic swarms and fugitive marks.

Regularised, centralising and defining forces are

disrupted, subverted and deterritorialised. The

nomadic and fugitive are subject to forces that

capture

and formalise. Monolithic and viral tendencies

mutually infiltrate.

Overall the attempt is made to maintain a state of

flow, of passage between these forces where both are

in danger of overrunning but are constantly overthrown

- with the resulting mutations and proliferations

played out.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

'One of the exhibits in the Embassy of the Real will be Film by Samuel Beckett. Here is the oft-quoted last line of Beckett’s book The Unnamable:

‘You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on.’

The reason I’m starting with this is that it focuses on a condition. It’s a sort of diagram. The condition is that we can’t escape from ‘going on’, from reaching, desiring, living – we can’t just stop. But we can’t fall back on old narratives and structures that are deeply unsatisfactory, riddled with compromised power dynamics. Neither can we go ‘forward’ into promises and seductions of false utopias and homecomings. It leaves us in a stuttering, stammering, flailing place. Unmoored, disoriented, dislocated and – in the digital age – overwhelmed and urgently negotiating the blurred realm between the supposed free play of simulacra and the gravitational drag of representation. But it’s a place that’s not without great potential for generating new conditions for thinking differently.

The Embassy of the Real seems to be opening up a labile place, an in-between place, where rhythmic forces of disruption, of making and unmaking, organising and disorganising, are going on. Instead of attempts at mastery or escape, attempts are being made to think relationally, rhythmically, dynamically. Holding patterns are being opened where resilience can be developed around radical uncertainty. They are spaces of risk and encounter where new combinations, assemblages, constellations and trans-codings can be experimented with.

Monsters and polymorphous hybrids are being constructed that can traverse spaces: they send out tentacles, code, spores, Morse, polyrhythmic transmissions through all sort of spaces – race, gender, animal, technological, ecological. A capacity for a more polyrhythmic way of thinking across systems is being developed: ‘choreographic thinking’, to use William Forsythe’s words, where unmaking is as important as making, and both are in complex, kinetic, dynamic relation.

In Donna Haraway’s text ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in which she rejects boundaries between human–animal–machine (and disrupts thinking around gender), she says: ‘Grammar is politics by another means.'

*_*__*_*_*_*_**_*_*_*_*_*___*_*_****___*_*_*_*

extended text from conversation with Himali for Artforum:

'I think of drawing as something active, performative, constantly unfolding. My drawings are middle spaces, sites or fields of activity where I am attempting to find passage, to feel my way, to probe, touch, excavate, navigate, plumb. I’m trying to traverse all sorts of spaces and times, all sorts of states of matter and across scales. They are fields of relation, of emergence.

I'm trying to open up a clearing where as many different ways of thinking about space, time, matter, can be brought into rhythmic relations, to generate emergent, complex organisations through the making..where forces can be at play making and unmaking, gathering, dispersing, disrupting, building, destroying, asserting, obliterating, erasing... a weather system of graphite.

I want the spaces to be polyphonous, multiple, complex, dynamic. I want these spaces to be as much constructed from stuttering, stammering, hesitations, uncertainties, probings, flailings and confusions as robust, bold assertions and discharges of energy: for forces of doubt and certainty, absence and presence, to be in constant dynamic relation.

The drawings are fugitive, heterogenous spaces: grey areas. I'm trying to constantly disrupt the figure/ground relation to make blurred spaces where the conditions of focusing are undone. The drawings are the turbulence between noise and signal. They are a space of difference and deferral, a space of encounter.

Although they are suggestive of scientific readings, so many different sorts of 'reading' are brought into the text of the the drawing that they are scrambled. I suppose I am trying to make broadband spaces where signals at multiple frequencies are being transmitted and received - including those not usually within 'range': sonar, ultraviolet.. the very fast and the very slow. I mine all sorts of ways of thinking visually about space and time. I like Deleuze's phrase 'atoms, insects, mountains, stars'. I really love the beautiful images generated by the sciences that suggest so many different spaces and times - the spiral paths of the particles in bubble chambers, infinitely fast and small; the images of cellular mitochondria; the Hubble Deep Field images that probe deep time.. where all time is held in the surface of the image but can't be reached.

I like looking at images that show quantum scale events so fleeting and also images of aerial views of cities at night, all the emergent formations at a macro scale that look like deep sea organisms in the dark water.. I also love the aerial view images of the Nasca Lines, airports in use and obsolete that are reminiscent of the Nasca Lines, images of aerial view of ancient civilisations that have been covered over because the water source that was the seed of their emergence dried up and became extinct.

I constantly listen to sound when I draw - from the white noise of rainfall, field recordings from all environments, I love the sound artist Francisco Lopez - the humming and buzzing of his 'buildings of New York' for example, I love the transmissions from the hydrophones under the Antarctic Ice, live streamed on the internet, as well as all sorts of music. I try to attend as closely as possible to the sound and to transcribe it's rhythms into the drawing, to make a sort of seismograph. I love all of these sorts of 'readings': seismographs, spectrographs, visual representations of musical notation, data, code, morse, glyphs and inscriptions.

I try to bring very different ways of thinking rhythmically about space into relation within the drawing and sound/music helps me to do this. Marks that are suggestive of the airborne or the sub-oceanic, for example, can come into relation with marks, lines, traces and paths suggestive of circuitry, telecommunications, morse, molecules, stars, shoals, electronic pulses, particles, networks. I want the drawings to be intertextual, textile.. polyrhythmic weavings being made and unmade.

I want there to be as much 'time' enfolded into the drawing as possible, from the shortest, fastest to the long and slow. I want to time time and space space - incantatory.. to rhythmically conjugate and to drum up. I am making dark regions of lost time, passed time, histories, the repressed, buried, hidden, obscured, forgotten: active rememberings and forgettings.. When I build up dense areas of information in graphite it accumulates and becomes compressed, compacted, obscure.. dark, potent, encrypted like coal, peat or black oil. This density acts as a dark engine in the drawing, emitting dark signals. There are questions of loss, of memory, of aftermath, of the material heat and draw and potency they exert. There are questions of desire, longing, separation, reaching… also 'clearings', emptinesses, vacancies, voids, 'black outs' that create the conditions for arrivals, new time, future possibilities for emergence.

Graphite is a medium that lends itself perfectly to this sort of rhythmic making and unmaking. It is a material for palimpsest, constructed from physical layers that shed easily. It is very susceptible to touch from the most quiet, nuanced, whispering of marks, the freely and energetically gestural, cool 'scientific' diagrammatic depersonalised marks, notation, glyphs, lines through to the violence of pencils that scratch, gouge, probe, bore, excavate, pencils loaded into electric drill and jigsaws

that churn and dig: marks that cut and marks that stitch, marks that damage and destroy and marks that construct, heal, generate.

Graphite powder can be dropped onto primed paper and the impact frozen like a bomb crater. An unmediated 'moment', a graphite event instant in time that carries a very different sort of heat and energy than the sort gathered in dark layerings and obscure markings that have been rubbed and sanded and compacted down and are no longer available to deciphering that are no longer available to be looked at at all.. All of these states of matter of graphite, these emergent organisations, are in a state of 'exchange' like a city or a psyche or the carbon and water cycles where nothing disappears and everything returns or persists and insists in one form or another. I like the quote from Faulkner 'nothing ever happens once and is finished'.

I like to think of carbon in different states: coal, diamond, smoke, black oil, - a material that is both an insulator and a conductor.. and water in all its states: ice, snow, mist, rain, vapour, torrential, oceanic, still, deep fleeting. One of my favourite films is Tarkovsky's Stalker.. the way water, time, desire, loss, longing, memory play out in the film-time-space.

Graphite maps, unfolds, describes and returns to dust in the drawings in systems of exchange. I want them to be humming graphite sound-fields: vibratory, oscillatory, many-voiced, assertions and hesitations but also full of silences, voids, ghosts. residues and remainders. Intimate - about touch - and also distant. A weather of all these things. A space of contagion, contamination that tunes, detunes, retunes, receives, transmits, scrambles, orders, disorders, makes and unmakes.'

_+_++_+_+_+_+_----=-++-=-=-+=-+_=_+_+_+_+_+-=-=-=_+-=_=-+-=_+-

Art Monthly magazine

exhibition review

Emma McNally:

Fields, Charts, Soundings

by Peter Suchin

In the scholarly essay accompanying Emma McNally’s ‘Fields, Charts, Soundings’ at T1+2 Artspace, Ana Balona de Oliveira provides a list of possible readings of McNally’s drawings. They may be, she suggests, perceived as ‘aerial views, battlefield maps, geological formations, oceanic charts, disease transmissions, animal migratory routes, molecule structures [or] black holes’. The sentence in fact ends with an ‘etc’, leaving the list of potential perceptions of the work open to further elaboration. De Oliveira is right to emphasise the polysemic aspect of these complicated, energetic drawings. But though one’s initial impression may be of maps or other kinds of compressed or abstracted informational forms, in the end these works are fully independent of the types of object they superficially resemble.

Perhaps these drawings – there are some 20 works in the show (all pencil on paper) – can hold such a multiplicity of allusions because the marks of which they are comprised are themselves extremely diverse, with their use of scale (ranging from the vast Field 1, measuring 229 x 304.5 cm, to pieces on A4 paper) also adding to their suggestive disposition. McNally is technically very inventive, generating with the pencil a multiplicity of lines, dots, scratches or tracks, building up individual works from literally thousands and thousands of marks that frequently make up specific units or shapes – thick, solid circles; tiny, sharp dots; wiggly yet rigid lines; equilateral triangles laid point to point; blocked-in squares containing crosses – all overlaid and underpinned with neat grids and other reticulated structures that run across the entire surface. The result is that the drawings, whatever else they might seem to represent, can also be considered as archives or storehouses of what linguists term iterable units, forms akin to letters of the alphabet that may be used to produce meaning; in short a kind of writing. But although a key aspect of languages comprising distinct units is that they employ a strictly restricted (and thereby repeatable) lexicon of signs, the reading of McNally’s work as writing in the conventional sense is thwarted by the fact that the marks used are both fixed and fluid. While a substantial number of the signs McNally makes are repeated over and over again, many of them are not so much iterable as amorphous, instances of scribble or at least what one might term a bastardised version of a sign or distinct unit. To take the analogy further, such forms are like handwriting that is so unclear and unstructured as to render the message unreadable. Such imprecision (though it is of course here combined with a plethora of precise marks) is a move towards what Roland Barthes referred to as the signifier without the signified, to the playful indulgence in and deployment of the pure sign.

This combination of iterable and non-iterable markings gives McNally’s work, placed as it is between coded representation and loose but allusive drawing, a productive ambiguity that serves to remind us that, in spite of all the clichéd chatter in art schools and in the artworld proper to the effect that art is a language, it is no such thing. McNally’s drawings suggest writing, encoding and its concomitant decoding or decipherment, but they are visual works, not speech or writing by other means.

If there is a hint of the linguistic in ‘Fields, Charts, Soundings’, then there is also some reference to the musical, clearly in the last word of the title, but also in the drawings’ similarity to the musical scores of Cornelius Cardew and John Cage. McNally’s pseudo-scores are much more labour-intensive than those by these composers. They demonstrate immense labour, of time passed in the studio; time which passes again for the viewers who choose to give their full attention to the finished work. On occasion, certain patches of a given piece’s surface can feel overworked, as though the pencil has got stuck at that point, spiralling around in deep abandonment across an area only a few inches square. But from a distance this anomaly, suspension or ‘delay’ is not a problem, providing spaces of intensity within the broader plane of paper.

McNally does not restrict herself to the markings of carbon-lead. It is possible to detect parts of the works where the paper has been folded over then flattened out, or where she has cut into the drawing, emphasising the work as made thing. At a time when so many artists glorify inanity and ease of execution, such labour – put to such attractive and intelligent ends – is almost shocking to see. It is certainly a desirable disturbance.

Peter Suchin is an artist, critic and curator.

+_+_+_+_+____+_+_+++_++_+__+_+++_++__++_+_+_+++_+_+_+

‘To grasp rhythm and polyrhythmias in a sensible, pre-conceptual way, it is enough to look carefully at the surface of the sea. Waves come in succession: they take shape in the vicinity of the beach, the cliff, the banks. These waves have a rhythm, which depends on the season, the water and the winds, but also on the sea that carries them, that brings them. Each sea has it’s own rhythm..But look closely at each wave. It changes ceaselessly. As it approaches the shore, it takes the shock of the backwash: it carries numerous wavelets, right down to the tiny quivers that it orientates, but which do not always go in it’s direction. Waves and waveforms are characterised by frequency, amplitude and displaced energy. Watching waves, you can easily observe what physicists call the superposition of small movements. Powerful waves crash upon one another, creating jets of spray; they disrupt one another noisily. Small undulations traverse one another, absorbing, fading rather than crashing, into one another. Were there a current or a few solid objects animated by a movement of their own, you could have the intuition of what is a polyrhythmic field and even glimpse the relations between complex processes and trajectories, between bodies and waveforms ..’

Lefebvre / ' Rhythmnalysis'