photo: Thierry Bal (arrows left and right for further images)
‘The River that flows nowhere, like a sea.’
title from ‘River of Rivers in Connecticut’ - Wallace Stevens by way of Fred Moten
installation in The Armoury, Orford Ness
9 metres. Graphite and charcoal, from the Australian Blue Mountains, on paper
first and second photos: Thierry Bal. Arrows left and right of image
'When a nuclear bomb explodes, each radioactive bit of matter is an imploded diffraction pattern of spacetimemattering, a mushrooming of specific entangled possible histories. '
- Karen Barad
Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart (one move) in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/ différancing
- Karen Barad
‘Consent not to be a single being’
- Glissant by way of Fred Moten
‘Emma McNally has created a single large-scale graphite drawing on paper, approximately nine metres in length, made for the Armoury, a building once used to house elements of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE).
Inspired by the knowledge that the AWRE research programmes on Orford Ness led directly to a series of test explosions in the deserts of western Australia, McNally explores in her drawing the atomic and the atmospheric, the microcosm and the macrocosm. The drawing’s heavily worked surface charts the turbulence that occurs as different elements, forces and systems encounter and interact with each other. Her chosen medium is graphite, a naturally occurring form of crystalline carbon. The centrality of carbon emissions to climate change is one important aspect of the turbulence of our time to which McNally gives shifting form on paper.
The title of McNally’s work for Orford Ness is the last line of The River of Rivers in Connecticut by the American poet Wallace Stevens. Elsewhere in the poem, Stevens writes of the river as ‘an unnamed flowing’, an open space of sensations and associations which McNally’s immense graphite drawing also evokes.’
********
Humus soil
Humus is dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and animal matter decays. When plants drop leaves, twigs, and other material to the ground, it piles up. ... The thick brown or black substance that remains after most of the organic litter has decomposed is called humus
field of perturbation, oscillation, tremble, sound
not ‘mine’
Afterness
Orford Ness, Suffolk. July 1 - October 30 2021
Artangel // The National Trust
‘'.. powerful, and subtle .. a tremendous work .. in the chapel-like interior of the Armoury. A long drift of silvery substance hanging low in the darkened space – shadowy, and occasionally glinting, as if shot through with moonlight – this form is in fact created purely from paper, crumpled and covered with complex graphite drawings invoking the cosmos from atom to planet. Like weather, it seems to change as the light shifts. It might in itself be that desideratum – the artificial cloud.’
-Laura Cumming // The Observer // The Guardian //27.06.21
‘The success of “Afterness” lay in the fact that the works didn’t try to compete with the environment but engaged with it, generating productive speculation on what it means to make art in a place like this. Most of the works served to highlight the strangeness of the architecture that contained them. The built structures on Orford Ness are giant sculptures in their own right, many banked up with roof-high mounds of shingle escarpment to contain the blasts of the bombs that were once tested inside them. Emma McNally’s large-scale drawing in the Armory featured intersecting concentric circles traced by hand with remarkable delicacy, but the graphite was also thick, like metal. It was a drawing (of a vast lunar landscape? An astronomical map of the heavens?) but also a bulky looming shape, a sculpture hovering in a darkened space.
...
Collectively, the show’s artists worked at the fault line between conservation and destruction, animating the ecology and history of the site as a setting for both of those processes. Sometimes in ominous silence, as in McNally’s installation, and sometimes audibly, as in Library of Sound, the question was raised: What can art be in the face of a technology of death and extinction? Thus “Afterness” opened onto a larger set of issues: what W. G. Sebald called the natural history of destruction, surveillance technologies, new forms of warfare even more lethal than those developed in these collapsing buildings.
It’s par for the course now to expect global events to have scuppered long-planned initiatives like this one and perhaps even to have made them appear obsolete, artifacts of a distant epoch before the pandemic. But “Afterness” took place during the pandemic and seemed all the more urgent for that. Nothing here directly addressed Covid, but everything prompted us to think deeply about humanity’s place in an ecosystem that includes viruses as well as gulls and aquatic plants. The visible acceleration of the climate emergency makes work about weather, entropy, and exposure nothing if not timely. But I think what was most effective here also exceeded topical relevance, speaking to the need for a poetics reflecting precisely on the temporal as well as climatic implications of the militarization of nature, of permanent war and ceaseless surveillance. There was something necessarily untimely in the way the installations in “Afterness” created pockets of stillness and stasis, and in the way their dispersal across the landscape allowed you—forced you—to slow down.’
Extract from “Afterness’’ // Briony Fer // Artforum // 01.01.2022
‘At the end of the trail, I enter the Armoury.. where weapons were stored awaiting tests. Here Emma McNally has done a rather brilliant piece called ‘The river that flows nowhere, like a sea’. A large-scale drawing stretches across a frame lying on the floor. It depicts migration patterns, subatomic particles, cloud chambers, weather information and more, a meditation on how we try to measure and comprehend our place in the world. But there’s a problem: the result looks so much like an abandoned Ministry of Defence map rotting back to nature in a shed at the end of the world that many of the visitors I saw passed on by without attending to it.’
Stuart Jeffries // The Spectator // 31.07.21
‘Emma McNally’s The River that Flows Nowhere, Like a Sea, a gigantic pencil-drawn chart of unlabelled infographics and interconnections, concentric circles, seething sub and super-strata, suggestive of geology and topography and the tides, scrunched up in the old armoury like a chrysalis about to hatch. Visitors are offered torches with which to explore the detail in the dark, and the tableau of half-illuminated pantomime potholers is one of the show’s unexpected achievements.’
Sam Kinchin-Smith // London Review of Books // vol 43 No. 18 // 23.9.21
’The two most ambitious contributions to 'Afterness' are those reached towards the end of the route and which have to reckon with the largest spaces...
Emma McNally's The River that Flows Nowhere, Like A Sea, is found in the Armoury. Situated in dramatic semi-darkness, viewers, aided with torches, inspect a large crumpled drawing that has been presented on a plinth. As such, the paper resembles a three-dimensional cartographic representation of a mountainous landscape, a resemblance further suggested by the concentric rings amassed all over. Those diagrammatic rings further suggest ripples issuing from a detonation, once again connecting the artwork to the particularities of its location. In some respects, the sculptural qualities of McNally's work make it resemble the decommissioned bomb seen in a nearby building…
Susan Barnet and Jane Watt have suggested that the historical particularity of this site necessitates describing it as a 'blast radius' rather that a place as such. Central to the experiments conducted in this landscape, after all, was the optimism of mass destruction's efficacy. That scientific endeavour is palpable in some of the works of 'Afterness', especially in McNally's haunting piece’
Matthew Bowman // Art Monthly // October 2021
‘Another disconcerting presence is a giant crumpled paper map, its surface covered .. in cryptic circular symbols and shaded graphite, which hovers like a malign cloud, a seabed or a model mountain range just above the floor of the old Armory, formally a store for bombs and testing equipment.’
-Louisa Buck // ‘Island of Secrets’ // The Art Newspaper // 25.06.21
‘On dry land after a bracing boat crossing, the view back to Orford quay is reassuringly bucolic, which only enhances the exotic menace of Lab 1, the Armoury, and the Pagodas. Made for the secret testing of navigation and communication systems, missiles and the atomic bomb, these buildings tell of Britain’s deepest fears and ambitions from 1913 until the 1970s…
McNally’s drawing-cum-sculpture, crouched in the dark recesses of the Armoury, expands on the theme of experiments breaking loose, its constellations of systems and processes drawn in graphite on paper crumpled into three-dimensions, itemising the ways in which actions generate chain reactions.’
-Florence Hallett // i news
‘In The river that flows nowhere, like a sea, Emma McNally maps subatomic particles, radar waves and patterns of migration in graphite onto an undulating, three-dimensional length of paper. Its layer of rings and lines and axis are smudged and cryptic—these maps are not for finding your way back. The dark peeling armoury becomes a cloud chamber for the untenable; and the cloud, like the graphite paper, like the building, passes through and leaves behind its own trace. Sited in a place that reverberates still with the violence and trauma of now distant war, the work intervenes, moving through that history alongside the living flora and geology, envisaging something visionary, beyond.’
Rose Highan -Stainton // Map Magazine
‘.. it looks like those 3D diagrams .. of waves and the sea on computers, which shows both the waves on the top and the sea floor on the bottom .. showing how a tsunami wave travels along the sea before reaching land..’
-Ciara McNally
"your drawings look like an iceberg storm where all the icebergs in the antarctic and the arctic blow up into space and make clouds of dust and air and turn into the sky and the stars and the new moon"
-Stephanie McNally Mulligan (8 years old)
(fingerprinting) to ashon, emma
- Fred Moten
This is transcendental bruise
research, and shade research
recess, caresscavation, and a
kind of lining, but I sent to say,
but I meant to say “meant to
say mining,” made of giving,
but I meant to say all these
things, being all thumbs,
which is to ask, after the
brushwork, as it were, of your
thumbs, after the sense of
shade by hand, the irreducible
sacrament of manual application.
These notes on fingerpainting
note the refusal to separate finger
and painting is automatically
corrected into fingerprinting
dancing in emma’s “high water
mark” everywhere, which keeps
noticing nothing so nearly, so
nere, son so early in the waning
river sun, annotating neither here
nor there in general smudge and
march and lineated dinge, and a
depression of children’s lakes
full of wildly divergent arches
and little pegs of ribbon, rhythm,
strand, and water music, that I
thought of ashon’s thoughts on
nothing music - so, here’s some
being sent, by way of introduction.
++++++
'Imaginal cells are undifferentiated cells, which means they can become any type of cell. Many of these #imaginalcells are used to form the new body.
The process of transformation within the #chrysalis is known as #holometabolism'
+++++++
For C.
‘.. for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’'
-Yeats
“a chuisle mo chroí”
physics of entanglement
geographies of displacement
choral soundplace
complexity entanglement fugue skein knot spin weave rhythm
The modern sense "rain-cloud, mass of evaporated water visible and suspended in the sky" is a metaphoric extension that begins to appear c. 1300 . In Middle English, skie also originally meant "cloud."
The origin of the term "cloud" can be found in the Old English words clud or clod, meaning a hill or a mass of stone. Around the beginning of the 13th century, the word came to be used as a metaphor for rain clouds, because of the similarity in appearance between a mass of rock and cumulus heap cloud.
clod: a lump of clay or stone.
earth, moving.
Blue Danube
was the first operational British nuclear weapon.
Initial designs for the Blue Danube warhead were based on research derived from Hurricane, the first British fission device (which was neither designed nor employed as a weapon), tested in 1952. The actual Blue Danube warhead was proof-tested at the Marcoo (surface) and Kite (air-drop) nuclear trials[1] sites in Maralinga, Australia, by a team of Australian, British and Canadian scientists[2] in late 1956.
Carbon-14 (14C), or radiocarbon,
is a radioactive isotope of carbon with an atomic nucleus containing 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic materials is the basis of the radiocarbon dating
Bomb pulse
The bomb pulse is the sudden increase of carbon-14 (14C) in the Earth's atmosphere due to the hundreds of above ground nuclear bombs tests that started in 1945 and intensified after 1950 until 1963, when the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.[1] These hundreds of blasts were followed by a doubling of the relative concentration of 14C in the atmosphere.[2]
.. after the tests ended, the atmospheric concentration of the isotope began to decrease, as radioactive CO2 was fixed into plant and animal tissue, and dissolved in the oceans.
In 2019, Scientific American reported that carbon-14 from nuclear bomb testing has been found in the bodies of aquatic animals found in one of the most inaccessible regions of the earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.[33]
Carbon Transport Modeling
The perturbation in atmospheric 14C from the bomb testing was an opportunity to validate atmospheric transport models, and to study the movement of carbon between the atmosphere and oceanic or terrestrial sinks.[19]
‘Carbon-14 has been exploited to study plankton and other forms of sea life, revealing how the waters of the oceans circulate in a great interconnected web of currents that sweep round the planet’
‘Cloud’:
1: a visible mass of particles of condensed vapor (such as water or ice) suspended in the atmosphere of a planet (such as the earth) or moon
2: something resembling or suggesting a cloud: such as
a: a light filmy, puffy, or billowy mass seeming to float in the air
b(1): a usually visible mass of minute particles suspended in the air or a gas
(2): an aggregation of usually obscuring matter especially in interstellar space
(3): an aggregate of charged particles (such as electrons)
c: a great crowd or multitude : SWARM clouds of mosquitoes
3: something that has a dark, lowering, or threatening aspect clouds of war a cloud of suspicion
4: something that obscures or blemishes a cloud of ambiguity
5: a dark or opaque vein or spot (as in marble or a precious stone)
6: the computers and connections that support cloud computing storing files in the cloud—often used before another noun cloud storage/backup cloud software
The modern sense "rain-cloud, mass of evaporated water visible and suspended in the sky" is a metaphoric extension that begins to appear c. 1300 in southern texts, based on similarity of cumulus clouds and rock masses. The usual Old English word for "cloud" was weolcan (see welkin). In Middle English, skie also originally meant "cloud."
The last entry for cloud in the original rock mass sense in Middle English Compendium is from c. 1475.
‘scramble’:
to disrupt the signal
seefeelhear grey
sound
Maralinga
in the remote western areas of South Australia, was the site, measuring about 3,300 square kilometres (1,300 sq mi) in area, of British nuclear tests in the mid-1950s.
The Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal Australian people were displaced from the area to allow the tests to proceed.
Immense harm was inflicted to people, animals, place, land, ecology - rippling out through times and spaces.
In January 1985 native title was granted to the Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal Australian people, over some land, but around the same time, the McClelland Royal Commission identified significant residual nuclear contamination at some sites. Under an agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia, efforts were made to clean up the site before the Maralinga people resettled on the land in 1995. The main community, which includes a school, is Oak Valley. There are still concerns that some of the ground is still contaminated, despite two attempts at cleanup.
It was found in 2021 that radioactive ("hot") particles persist in the soil, after international multidisciplinary team of scientists studied the results produced by a machine at Monash University that is capable of slicing open tiny samples using a beam of high-energy ions only a nanometre wide. The analysis of the results suggested that natural processes in the desert environment could bring about the slow release of plutonium over a long period. This plutonium is likely to be absorbed by wildlife at Maralinga
The word ‘Maralinga’ means ‘thunder’.
‘Black Carbon’ - generated by bush fires in Australia, the burning of the Amazon, the burning of fossil fuels - is carried to Antarctica, Greenland, the Andean glaciers. It darkens the ice, which impacts on the ‘albedo’ - the whiteness. This has ever accelerating implications. The ice is not reflecting light as it once did. This is causing a feedback loop - the ice is melting, the waters are rising, the planet is warming.
When Australia was mapped by the British it was with a grid system know as Cadastral Mapping - which means ‘to organise by line’.
It allowed the land to be systemised and legible as property.
It was grafted onto what was called Terra Nullius, which means ‘nobody’s land’.
Last year, the lighthouse at Orford Ness was dismantled because of rising seas.
derelict map
migrating matter
thinking substance
cloud
turbulence
radiocarbon
entanglement
DNA
ripple chamber
trouble
chart
albedo
oscillations
undoing
breaking ground
sounding
pulse
sea
blue carbon
choreo
roiling
gathering
surfacing grounding
carbon
water
waves
high water mark
floodplain
grey area
destitute
sound field
fall
fall out
undo
dismantle
collapse
archipelagos
landsealandsea
cadastre
upheaval
melt
jetty
body of water
cloud chamber
vibratory field
place as chorus
score
black carbon
information
CO2
C14
dust
silt
discompose
till
undo enclosure
agitate
murky
perturb
seafloor
data
networks
mycelial
fugitive
palimpsest of stateless states
choral field
spin
skein
braid
weave
tissue
textile
knot
swirl
whirl
eddy
pathways
choral
soil
mulch
earth
dirt
sonority
complexity
bomb damage
radar satellite sonar lidar
echolocation
sound
weather
waterways
shadow graph
transmission
medium
reception
chart
paper
borders
periphery
rhythm
chora
microbial
quantum
neural
tangle
ore
mine
surround
resonance
construction nor ruin
signals
noise
scramble
‘difference without separation’
emergence
complexity
‘Consent not to be a single being.’
Édouard Glissant by way of Fred Moten
