Time Spirals
Emma McNally, Vanessa Billy
28 October 2022–14 January 2023
Preview 27 October
Large Glass
392 Caledonian Rd London N1 1DN
Large Glass presents a two-person exhibition of new and recent work in sculpture and drawing by Vanessa Billy and Emma McNally, who exhibit together for the first time. While working in different media, their practices synthesise varied materials, intricate processes and opposing possibilities, resulting in sensory encounters suffused with ecological and philosophical concerns.
London based artist Emma McNally’s practice is an ongoing exploration of rhythm, complexity and entanglement across scales, spaces and times. Drawing for McNally is a troubling of boundaries and separations, into zones of indeterminacy where binary and hierarchic thinking is undone. McNally understands her drawing practice as an experimental ‘thinking with others’ – across fields such as ecology, philosophy, music, urbanism, and choreography – to generate the conditions for the emergence of new configurations and material enmeshments. McNally’s ongoing large-scale drawing series Choral Fields (2014–) relates to the philosophical idea of the chora, a peripheral space in which forms materialise.
Zurich based artist Vanessa Billy uses a wide range of materials and production techniques in her sculpture, variously incorporating waste products or disused industrial parts, as well as highly crafted self-made elements. Harnessing the intrinsic qualities of matter, her works provoke the senses and explore the recesses of an origin common to all living and non-living things. She draws parallels between physical and mental constructs to reflect on the impact of human actions on the planet. In Whiplash (2021) Billy transforms a tractor tyre into a gigantic, crawling organism. Vertebrae (2021) is a ceramic replica of a human spinal cord with fibrous wires cascading from its centre.
Describing her approach to materiality as ‘transformation, permutation, assimilation’, Billy points to a shared resonance across both her and McNally’s work – one not easily distilled or settled, instead, ‘a constantly flowing series of interactions.’
Extract from Matt Bowman’s review of Time Spirals in Art Monthly 2/23:
‘Environmentalism, then, is present in ‘Time Spirals’ and benefits from subtle handling. Such concerns, moreover, are strengthened by being engaged through meditation upon material thinking. In this way, Billy and McNally interconnect the shift from medium to materiality that happened under Postminimalism and Arte Povera, for example, with the neo-materialist philosophy espoused by Karen Barad and Jane Bennett amongst others. Art discourses regarding process, therefore, become or conjoin with notions of vitalism and Bruno Latour’s actants. Such matter is conceptual from the get-go; it’s not a question of adding theory to brute stuff. But neo-materialism comprehends vitality as part of any object’s ontological state and enjoins us to be more receptive towards it. Hence, all artworks as material things already evince that vitality – it’s part of their ontology. Crucial to the fascination of Billy’s and McNally’s work is its refusal to merely assume vitality; instead, materialism is acknowledged, unfolded, and demonstrated in its relation to thought.’
“To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future."
- Karen Barad
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Some mulling around spirals.. (ongoing). . . …
Spacetimemattering (to use Karen Barad's formulation) is dynamic and nonlinear: it roils, spins, weaves, whirls, cleaves, knots, fugues, twists, loops, entwines, entangles.
It is choreography, dance, rhythm.
Spiralling doesn't belong to borders, units, individuals, subjects .. spiralling scrambles the grammar of relation into oscillations, polyrhythmia, polyphony, music, rhythm, sound, dance, flavour, fragrance - to 'entanglement' across times, scales, spaces.
The spiral disrupts binary thinking: it is not about either / or - it troubles separations (absence and presence, here and there, then and now.) Spirals spin, melt, dissolve into the grey area of polyrhythmic entanglement - braiding, plaiting, weaving, knotting, spinning - infinitely complex and dynamic.
Matter spirals across scales : quantum spin that dissolves the separation of 'absence' and 'presence', the roiling of heat and cold, 'energy cascade' that transfers energy from small scales of motion to large scales, the spirals of CO2 moving through the atmosphere, the currents of the oceans, the shapes of galaxies.
Spiralling melts the separation of 'states' - the interfacial zone between mist, rain, sea, ice spirals: matter moving.
The spiral breaks down the binary of 1 and 0 into what can't be counted. It is the zone of indeterminacy.
The spiral discomposes the categories of particle and wave.
The spiral is political.
Spiralling undoes the linearity of past, present and future into dynamic concurrence, confluence.
Spiralling is the 'with' word, the 'con' prefix
.
To spiral is to dance with: to gather.
Turbulence is matter spiralling: it creates the conditions for the new.
Cooking requires stirring, roiling, spiralling, turbulence: heat and movement.
The spiral is the continuous rhythm of cleaving, (making/unmaking) the ‘cutting together/apart - one move (Karen Barad)
The spiral is the continuum of making and unmaking - rhythm, with all of its violences of undoing.
DNA
Helices
Chirality
Quartz
Mycelial
Times
(thinking with Moten, Barad, Ferreira de Silva, Haraway, Kemp, Ornette and friends.. . . )
‘Consent not to be a single being’ - Moten by way of Glissant