top image: Joe Hales
lower two photos: Eva Herzog
Scroll down for more installation photos
Thank you to everyone who came along to spend time in the cave.
'The Earth is Knot Flat' ( 2 Oct – 15 Dec 2024 ) at Drawing Room, London is now open until December 15.
I have developed the thinking I was doing (with others) for my River drawing back in 2021 for Artangel ( 'Afterness' / Artangel .)
‘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)
‘ ‘The Earth is Knot Flat will be Emma McNally’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and her most ambitious installation to date.
Emma McNally scrambles the elements of drawing, generating multi-dimensional disruptive works that draw attention to the entangled complexity of existence in an age of extractive capitalism and environmental breakdown. By exploding the idea of a unitary ‘drawing’, she develops the capacity for complexity needed to imagine alternatives to individualised ways of being that lead to domination, subjugation and destruction.
McNally takes the raw materials of drawing – paper, graphite, gum arabic, kaolin – and upends them: crumpling, folding, twisting, perforating, scoring and rotating these components to produce large-scale, undulating works that tumble into the gallery like rock debris deposited by a glacier, pocked with cavities and recesses for nestling in. With no front or back, up or down, these surfaces are covered with a carbon patina, caked-on like soot or built up with an accumulation of mark-making – tangles of eddying ellipses or staccato scratches made using the hand and machines such as sanders or drills. Smaller works fidgeted together from wires, mesh and crochet are suspended in the air like cobwebbed clouds.
These works interact with each other rhythmically like notes in a score, without dominating logic or boundaries, forming a sensory ensemble. They are informed by geological processes, weather patterns, coral formations, planetary movements, atom bombs – a ‘complex topography’ of intricate systems in which each part is inescapably interconnected to the other. For McNally, this non-hierarchical approach challenges the ‘rational’ mindset of post-Enlightenment thinking, which used classification and categorisation as colonial, capitalist tools to dominate, subjugate and extract. Only by moving away from this atomised, binary approach towards a social ‘thinking-together’, that disrupts the idea of the artist, the individual and the self, can we create the conditions for resilience, consciousness and collectivity in which ‘the otherwise becomes possible.’
The Earth is Knot Flat will be Emma McNally’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and will feature embedded film projections made in collaboration with Manon Schwich. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to share in different ways of drawing and making over the duration of the exhibition.
Etymologies of Foam and Dust is a book published to coincide with The Earth is Knot Flat. Designed by Joe Hales, it includes an essay by Aya Nassar, an interdisciplinary scholar who writes about memory, material and post-colonial cityness. Generously supported by Jane Hamlyn and James Lingwood and others who wish to remain anonymous.
Artist biography
Born 1969, Essex, McNally lives and works in London. Her graphite drawings, a multitude of different marks, conjure up dynamic weather systems and matter moving through different states. They suggest an attempt to chart shifting systems of immense complexity, drawing on soundings, data visualisations, electronic microscopes, particle collision chambers and satellite imaging. She studied Philosophy and Literature at the University of York before continuing her thinking visually through drawing. For over 20 years McNally supported her drawing in the studio by painting large scale reproductions of Renaissance paintings on the street – including long periods outside York Minster, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London and on the South Bank of the Thames.
Recent group exhibitions include: After Mallarmé, curated by Michael Newman, Large Glass, London (2024); Denniston Hill, Marian Goodman NYC (2023); After Mallerme. Afterness, Artangel / National Trust, Orford Ness, UK (2021); 20th Biennale of Sydney, AU (2016), The Form of Form, Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016); Mirrorcity, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2015); Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London (2014). Seeing/Knowing, Kenyon College of Liberal Arts, Ohio, US (2011). In the period 2016–21, McNally withdrew from exhibiting and was involved intensely with political activism. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, US, MONA, AU, The British Museum and The Ashmolean, UK.’
The Earth is Knot Flat is supported by:
‘In Other Words…’
-Fred Moten
babble is brookish,
an open-bookish
kinda thing, some
falling into seeing
the fluidity of the
good black earth
when it feels like
weeping in reed-
song. see, that's
real – a violence
of willow cabin,
a silten throat to
share. reading
is just residual,
rückenfigural
corresponding
back and forth
in waterfalling
so we can feel
how feel sounds,
and know how
good was, and
revel, and rappel
a picture-feeling
in the runaway
bubbling from
before’s old-new
beguining, mid
dle seethe, and
model aftermath.
'By violating the rule of separability, we are able to displace the most resilient conceptual impediments'
Denise Ferreira da Silva
‘In the face of this stealing from the stolen what we continue to receive in them is their stealing away, in undercommon assembly, in the thickness, in varying sharpnesses of drafting and overdrafting, of speculative, anarchitectural, antinational, profanational drawing, of parabolic turns and eccentric, centrifugal, extracircular returns of the drawing of breath, drawn away from it, in and out of itself, of scale, over (and under) rule, (up) against it. Our high-low monastic nothingness is irrectangular blurrrrr, out of line and out of round and out of turn, multiply tabled/terkhed/torqued/ twerked/tongued, our uncorralled chorale.’
Moten+Harney
Uncountable
the practice of decay
the practice of impuring
‘impure’: not pure; mixed with extraneous matter, especially of an inferior or contaminating nature
contaminate
/kənˈtamɪneɪt/
Origin
late Middle English: from Latin contaminat- ‘made impure’, from the verb contaminare, from contamen ‘contact, pollution’,
from con- ‘together with’ + the base of tangere ‘to touch’.
the practice of contaminating.. touching with
declivity (n.)
"a downward slope," 1610s, from French déclivité, from Latin declivitatem (nominative declivitas) "a slope, declivity," from declivis "a sloping downward," from de "down" (see de-) + clivus "a slope," from PIE *klei-wo-, suffixed form of root *klei- "to lean."
rhythm (n.)
16c. spelling variant or attempted classical correction of Middle English rime "measure, meter, rhythm," also "agreement in end-sounds of words or metrical lines, rhyme; a rhyming poem" (12c.), from Old French rime "verse," from Latin rhythmus "movement in time," from Greek rhythmos "measured flow or movement, rhythm; proportion, symmetry; arrangement, order; form, shape, wise, manner; soul, disposition," related to rhein "to flow" (from PIE root *sreu- "to flow").
‘A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’
Walter Benjamin
‘There is a rhythm making a world, and the time and space this rhythm beats out invites individuation in this world. This is a rhythm that has been around for five hundred years. But now it sounds to itself like the only rhythm, the rhythm of the world, and of the individuals who strive to live in that world.’
Harney+Moten
‘Love is not a state’
Judith Butler
‘To fall is to lose one’s place, to lose the place that makes one, to relinquish the locus of being, which is to say of being-single’
Moten+Harney
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.
Shakespeare ‘Ariel’s Song’ from The Tempest
'‘Blacklight, or ultraviolet radiation, works through that which it makes shine: for example, it has the capacity to transform at the DNA level, that is, it reprograms the code in the living thing exposed to it, and causes mayhem in their self-reproductive capacity at the cellular level. We could think of this process as one of breaking up a modern substance, that is, of separating form (the code, the formula, the algorithm, or the principle) and matter (content, or that of which something is composed). (I use the modifier “modern” because of my interest in dissolving the abstract forms of the understanding. However, there is nothing to prevent us from imaging blacklight breaking through any other abstract or sensible form, even, hopefully, at the atomic level. In any event.)'
Denise Ferreira da Silva
'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
‘…the wrecked and crowded surface of approach, which is a kind of deepening, digging, working, kneading, in and out of haptic need…’
Fred Moten
‘There’s a movement of the earth against the world. It’s not the movement. It’s not even a movement. It’s more like what Tonika calls a procession, a holy river come down procession, a procession in black, draped in white. The earth’s procession sways with us. It moves by way of a chant. It steps in the way of the base, in the way of the dancing tao. It bows to the sisters of the good foot, carrying flowers from Caliban’s tenderless gardens. The earth is on the move. You can’t join from the outside. You come up from under, and you fall back into its surf. This is the base without foundation, its dusty, watery disorchestration on the march, bent, on the run. Down where it’s greeny, where it’s salty, the earth moves against the world under the undercover of blackness, its postcognitive, incognitive worker’s inquest and last played radio.’
Moten + Harney
'We must return to what was destroyed, to the ruins and to the possibilities that were doomed to appear as “past.” We must rebuild and resurrect them with and for the sake of those who were colonized and expelled, with and for the sake of their descendants.
The ruins should be inhabited as part of processes and formations of repair, of a slow repair that draws on the many different formations of social, political, and spiritual care that were destroyed by European technologies of violence and colonial and international law imposed on all pre-colonial communal laws.'
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
“a theater of refusal, a theater of refuse, a theater of refuse, a theater of the refused, a theater of the refusal of what has been refused, a theater of the left over, a theater of the left behind, a theater of the left, a theater of the (out and) gone”
‘Consent not to be a single being’
Fred Moten
Deep Implicancy : to consider our world out of time, to think about a primordial moment of entanglement prior to the separation of matter into the forms we currently know, both human and non-human
Denise Ferreira da Silva // Arjuna Neuman
‘Facing the im/possibilities of living on a damaged planet, where it is impossible to tease apart political, economic, racist, colonialist, and natural sources of homelessness (otherwise called “the problem of refugees”), will require multiple forms of collective praxis willing to risk interrupting the “flow of progress”—not by bombing the other but by blasting open the continuum of history.’
Karen Barad
“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”
Judith Butler
***********
‘Eytmology of dust’
Inhabiting the ruins…..
we, as ‘angel of history’
The daily practice of decay
late Middle English: from Old French decair, based on Latin decidere ‘fall down or off’, from de- ‘from’ + cadere ‘fall’.
debris
early 18th century: from French débris, from obsolete débriser ‘break down’.
debris (n.)
"accumulation of loose matter or rubbish from some destructive operation or process," 1708, from French débris "remains, waste, rubbish" (16c.), from obsolete debriser "break down, crush," from Old French de- (see de-) + briser "to break," from Late Latin brisare, which is possibly of Gaulish origin (compare Old Irish brissim "I break").
non linearity
non sequentiality
indeterminacy
Decaying the material conditions of 'inscription'
inscription (n.)
late 14c., from Latin inscriptionem (nominative inscriptio) "a writing upon, inscription," noun of action from past-participle stem of inscribere "inscribe, to write on or in (something)," from in- "in" (from PIE root *en "in") + scribere "to write" (from PIE root *skribh- "to cut"). Related: Inscriptional.
séance (n.)
1789, "a sitting, a session," as of a learned society, originally in French contexts, from French séance "a sitting," from seoir "to sit," from Latin sedere "to sit" (from PIE root *sed- (1) "to sit"). Meaning "spiritualistic session in which intercourse is alleged to be held with ghosts of the dead" is recorded by 1845.
'..But bog
Meaning soft,
The fall of windless rain,
Pupil of amber.
Ruminant ground,
Digestion of mollusc
And seed-pod,
Deep pollen-bin.
Earth-pantry, bone vault,
Sun-bank, embalmer
Of votive goods
And sabred fugitives.
Insatiable bride.
Sword-swallower,
Casket, midden,
Floe of history.
Ground that will strip
Its dark side,
Nesting ground,
Outback of my mind...'
'I love this turf-face,
Its black incisions,
The cooped secrets
Of process and ritual;
I love the spring
Off the ground,'
Seamus Heaney
"a nutritious substance," 1828, noun use of adjective (1640s) meaning "providing nourishment," which is from Latin nutrientem (nominative nutriens), present participle of nutrire "to nourish, suckle, feed," from PIE *nu-tri-, suffixed form (with feminine agent suffix) of *(s)nau- "to swim, flow, let flow," hence "to suckle," extended form of root *sna- "to swim."
dust (n.)
"fine, dry particles of earth or other matter so light that they can be raised and carried by the wind," Old English dust, from Proto-Germanic *dunstaz (source also of Old High German tunst "storm, breath," German Dunst "mist, vapor," Danish dyst "milldust," Dutch duist), from PIE *dheu- (1) "dust, smoke, vapor" (source also of Sanskrit dhu- "shake," Latin fumus "smoke").
Meaning "elementary substance of the human body, that to which living matter decays" was in Old English, hence, figuratively, "mortal life." Sense of "a collection of powdered matter in the air" is from 1570s. Dust-cover "protective covering to keep dust off" is by 1852; dust-jacket "detachable paper cover of a book" is from 1927.
To kick up the (or a) dust "cause an uproar" is from 1753, but the figurative use of dust in reference to "confusion, disturbance" is from 1560s, and compare Middle English make powder fly "cause a disturbance or uproar" (mid-15c.). For bite the dust see bite (v.).
dust (v.)
c. 1200, "to rise in the air as dust;" later "to sprinkle with dust" (1590s) and "to rid of dust" (1560s); from dust (n.). Related: Dusted; dusting. Sense of "to kill" is U.S. slang first recorded 1938 (compare bite the dust under dust (n.)).
also from c. 1200
‘They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.
Amoc, which encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of human-caused global heating.’
roil spin swirl whirl knot weave cook currents gyres waves move
turbulence
'the drawer of water does not forget, is aware of the water's memory, too, like Morrison says, the river's memory of itself, which we call flood, and which comes to us, or with us, as whirl or whorl, which is the water's knotting of itself, it's notice of its selflessness, it's no-thingness, it's fallenness in/to/with all.'
Fred Moten
fall to drop or descend under the force of gravity, as to a lower place through loss or lack of support. To come or drop down suddenly to a lower position, especially to leave a standing or erect position suddenly, whether voluntarily or not: to become less or lower; become of a lower level, degree, amount, quality, value, number, strength etc.; decline. ‘To fall is to lose one’s place, to lose the place that makes one, to relinquish the locus of being, which is to say of being-single.’
- Fred Moten & Stefano Harney.
whirl c. 1300, probably from Old Norse hvirfla "to go round, spin."
inseparabilty 'By violating the rule of separability, we are able to displace the most resilient conceptual impediments.' - Denise Ferreira da Silva
confluence (n.) a flowing together, especially of two or more streams, from Late Latin confluentia, from Latin confluentem (nominative confluens), present participle of confluere "to flow together," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + fluere "to flow."
canto chorus; choral; chant.
tide the alternate rising and falling of the sea, usually twice in each lunar day at a particular place, due to the attraction of the moon and sun. "The changing patterns of the tides."
breathe (v.) to draw air into and expel it from the lungs; to inhale and exhale.
nebulous late 14c., "cloudy, misty, hazy" (of the eye, fire-smoke, etc.), from Latin nebulosus "cloudy, misty, foggy, full of vapor," from nebula "mist, vapour" (from PIE root *nebh- "cloud").
Fractus from the Latin fractus, past participle of the verb frangere, which means to shatter, break, snap, fracture.
gather come together; assemble or accumulate.
floodplain an area of low-lying ground adjacent to a river, formed mainly of river sediments and subject to flooding.
Photos: Eva Herzog