“Emma McNally's drawings suggest maps or charts of things as complex and various as seas, the night sky, military bases, computer circuit boards, data-flow, 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 could map a mindscape.

McNally made Choral Fields 1-6 in a studio by the River Thames at London's West India Dock, 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."

Stephanie Rosenthal

‘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.'

Richard Deacon

‘..With some stunning large scale video works, such as Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Painting with History ... 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..’

The Guardian

The first 6 of the Choral Field series was made for Mirrorcity: London Artists on Fiction and Reality (Hayward Gallery). The series was extended to 12 for The Embassy of the Real on Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour as part to the 20th Biennale of Sydney.

One of the series is installed in the Kinder Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Two are in the permanent collection of MONA, Tasmania and two are with the Neilson Foundation, Australia.

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Choral Fields 1-12
(200cm x 304cm)
graphite on paper

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.”

- Biennale of Sydney