Selected press:
‘The Earth is Knot Flat’
Drawing Room, London
October 2 - December 15 2024
‘Combining echoes of the sublime with a strong visual sense of today’s “beyond human” otherness, this new exhibition – her first solo presentation in a public institution – by Emma McNally reveals her to be an artist whose work combines the conceptual, the material and the dialogic. She has transformed the main gallery space at Drawing Room into a landscape where nature, so to speak, is not just remembered but re-enchanted. This is less an exhibition than an environmental installation that draws us in through its variegations of grey and blackness into a manifold otherness. Her intense manipulation of paper pieces assembled together into unearthly constructs, filigreed by multiple hand-drawn lines and textured through modes of crumpling (worked on for months preceding the exhibition), combined with empathic filmic effects by Manon Schwich, make this one of the year’s most enthralling exhibitions.’
Bronac Ferran for Studio International
‘At first glance the swirling, palimpsestic haze of marks in each evokes, especially in this low light, a Turneresque maelstrom, but coming closer with my torch the component atoms come into focus. Fields of furtive dashes alternate with patches of tidy benday dots. The circles and ellipses of pure geometry are jostled by the repetitive stabbings of a pencil attached to a power tool. Faint white furrows and curing grey spirals are crossed by long-distance striations. In places the graphite has been smudged into a grey cloud and the paper sanded back to a lighter, mottled shade. As I point my light towards a slew of marks in one area the image seems to list to one side, only to glide off in a different direction as I turn the beam and another layer of marks draws my eye.’
Andrew Chesher for Art Monthly 11/24
After Mallarmé
Large Glass (London)
12 Apr—19 Jul 2024
‘The leitmotif of this third segment of the show, Mallarmé's idea of the constellation, was overtly referenced by [Cerith Wyn] Evans's work [Shadows]. The pages selected from it included those representing the last two double-page spreads of Un coup de dés in which the design evokes part of the constellation of Ursa Major. ... nearby Emma McNally's drawings suggested uncharted asterisms. Her TC1, 2024, made of torqued and distorted tracing paper suspended from a thread and covered in a tracery of plotted fields and scrambled marks, is a cartographic contortionist trying to undo its own order.’
Andrew Chesher // Art Monthly // September 2024
Time Spirals
Large Glass (London)
28 Oct - 14 Jan ‘23
‘.. McNally, however, doesn’t follow a readymade topographic system nor do her Choral Fields create an alternative system that can ultimately be grasped by the viewer so that a certain type of mark-making translates a specific landform. Rather, her marks map forces and flows. Not picturing landscapes, McNally’s topographies are describable as ‘setting-up worlds’ (borrowing a formulation from Martin Heidegger) or acts of world-making.
… 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….’
Art Monthly 2/23 // Matthew Bowman
Afterness
Artangel // The National Trust. Orford Ness, Suffolk. July 1 - October 30 2021
‘Far more powerful, and subtle, is a tremendous work by the .. artist Emma McNally 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 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.
Artforum 01.01.2022 // Briony Fer
‘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
20th Biennale of Sydney:
‘..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, UK
'Drawing Outside the Lines'
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 gray 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 Mirrorcity 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: ‘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..’:
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 London-based artist, Emma McNally, and her study in fine graphite drawing.’
Vice: The Creators Project
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 Agenda Australia:
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:
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:
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. ..
Art Monthly
Peter Suchin ‘Fields Charts Soundings’ T1+2 Artspace:
‘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.