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Stephanie Rosenthal

Director of Berlin’s Martin-Gropius Bau

Previously Chief Curator at Hayward Gallery London, Artistic Director 20th Biennale of Sydney:

"Emma McNally’s drawings suggest maps or charts of things as complex and various as seas, the night sky, military bases, computer circuit boards, 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 would map a mindscape.

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.”

Richard Deacon

Artist / Curator of ‘Abstract Drawing’ at Drawing Room, London. 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.'

Mary Doyle

Co-director, The Drawing Room, London:

On first impression Emma McNally’s huge scale drawings might be compared to mappings of constellations, or an ordinance survey of some landmass or sonar reading. They appear to be the result of scientific readings or an outcome of mathematical research, but are made very intuitively, creating a dynamic visual score similar to soundscapes. Looking closer the works are made up of repeated marks, crosses, dashes and dots and traces of lines that converge to create a matrix of activity. This activity implies a force field containing geometric spaces and areas of frenetic energy that spiral and spin off into a void-like space.

McNally works very intensely, often working on a large drawing over many months. Her drawings are much like writing or a musical score made up of a vocabulary of signs and symbols that create a state of balance and flux. McNally has a singular approach to making work and her focus on drawing is especially intriguing for its quasi-scientific yet extremely intuitive approach. Underlying is a metaphysical and philosophical approach, yet they are very much about the physicality of making itself.

Adam Greenfield

Author of ‘Radical Technologies’ ‘Against The Smart City’ and ‘Everyware’:

I was smitten dumb by Emma McNally's drawings the very moment I laid eyes on them. Very, very few images — and certainly none at all that are static — have ever captured quite as well for me what it feels like to live in the world in this moment. Coming into view of one of her large-format pieces is like the onset of some enormous music. From half a room away you feel the surge of power through sharply-inscribed meridians; as you draw closer, their intense physicality resolves in detail. Lines of force flex and shudder around dark attractors, particles of unlight swarm and coalesce, decisions made elsewhere and -when fold back against our bodies in the here and now. I'm still not sure via what magick it is that she translates all of this onto the picture plane, but there it is.

Baptiste Lanaspeze

founder of Editions Wildproject  www.wildproject.org:

As a publishing house devoted to ecological humanities, we published for our 10-year anniversary a book that tried to ‘map’ the issues, authors and references of the French ecological thought in development. We needed inside the book a leitmotiv visual work that could give shape to the complexity of this lively galaxy in full blooming – something organic, systemic, crafted, beautiful, dramatic, map-like and dream-like, ambiguous. We found it nowhere – but in Emma McNally’s drawings.

Curtis Roads

Author Composing Electronic Music (OUP) Microsound (MIT) The Computer Music Tutorial (MIT)

Musical Sign Processing (Routledge) Foundations of Computer Music (MIT)

Former chair and current vice chair of the Media Arts & Technology, University of California, Santa Barbara:

The artist Emma McNally pursues an aesthetic direction that closely aligns to the ideas described in my book Microsound (MIT Press) and my music POINT LINE CLOUD (Asphodel). In this work, the sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line, and cloud emerge as the density of tiny sonic sound grains increases. Sparse emissions produce rhythmic patterns. By lining up the grains in rapid succession, one can induce an illusion of tone continuity or pitch. As the grains meander, they flow into streams and rivulets. Dense agglomerations of grains form clouds of sound whose shapes evolve over time.

These complex processes of detailed pattern formation find a direct echo in Emma McNally's brilliant and evocative visual art works.

Manuel Lima

Author, lecturer, and researcher is a leading voice on information visualisation and the founder of

Visualcomplexity.com

Author of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

“the man who turns data into art” (Wired Magazine)

“the Edward Tufte of the 21st Century” (Creativity Magazine):

‘I first became aware of Emma McNally when I was researching for my latest book ‘Visual Complexity’... McNally’s work was the perfect complement to a chapter entitled ‘Complex Beauty’ when I investigate the beginning of a new movement in art which I call ‘networkism’ .. work influenced by recent developments in network science and information visualisation. As one of the main precursors of the movement, McNally’s work is featured prominently in the chapter and has enriched the book in a remarkable way.Networkism is a growing trend, characterised by the portrayal of figurative graph structures – illustrations of network topologies revealing convoluted patterns of nodes and links... (McNally’s) cartographic conjectures...expose astonishing landscapes of intense graphite depicting fictitious networks, paths and trajectories that resemble geological maps, oceanic charts, black holes or molecular structures...’

Henry Somers-Hall

Author ‘Hegel, Deleuze and the Critique of Representation’ (SUNY 2012)

Co-editor of ‘The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze’ (Cambridge University Press, 2012):

‘We can say of McNally’s work that it is beautiful, both in the intuitive sense of eliciting pleasure, as well as in the technical sense of figuring the structure of our reason, albeit with the understanding of reason as processual, relational, and non-representational that has emerged as central to the paradigm of post-war European philosophy.

McNally's work exhibits a carefully constructed attempt to portray essence not as substance, through the subject of a work or by the introduction of archetypes, but rather as the result of a process of reciprocal determination, where individual lines, markings, and trajectories are brought to significance through their interrelations with those around them. In this sense, McNally's work exemplifies aesthetically the revolution initiated in philosophy by Gilles Deleuze (and his later collaborations with Guattari) towards a rhizomatic or diagrammatic image of thinking.... McNally sets out a novel trajectory that allows for thinking beyond the irony and skepticism of the postmodern. McNally’s cartographies are, to use a characterisation of Proust’s, in this sense 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.' As such, they allow us to see that the attempt to think beyond representation to reconcile process, genesis and structure is not merely an abstract intellectual possibility, but a concrete, coherent and above all real project, productive of works of both philosophical and aesthetic merit. ‘

Jose Alfredo Ramirez Director Groundlab Ltd

Co director Landscape Urbanism Graduate Programme at Architectural Association Director Architectural Association Mexico Visiting School:

‘In Landscape Urbanism Graduate Programme at the Architectural Association we are very interested in the way we represent the world around us through drawings and maps. As architects we develop projects that can produce positive changes to contemporary conditions. Because of this we are constantly looking to other disciplines and professions that can teach us new and inspiring ways to achieve this. This is the case of Emma McNally, who has contributed to the Landscape Urbanism Lecture and seminar series in the past year by sharing with us her work, methodology and vision about maps and drawings: what they can do and how they can open the new possibilities for the future. She has a very special relation with a specific material to produce drawings/maps, carbon, and this has been an eye opener for students who have realised the importance of technique and material to achieve a style and a point of view to give voice to their minds. Her speculations in paper open up new paths to represent the dynamism and temporal aspects of our complex world .’

Francisco Lopez

‘internationally recognised as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene.’:

‘Despite being in contact with a large number of visual artists and being familiar with many contemporary artistic manifestations, I have rarely come across an artist like McNally for generating a profound, complex and self-contained world with such simple means. I take this to be an extremely valuable skill, particularly in the tech-savvy and highly sophisticated climate we live in with technological implementations of all kinds in the domain of art.’

Contemporary Art Society:

‘Emma McNally’s drawing, Carbon Cleaving , brings different ways of describing space together: cartographies, technological spaces, telecommunications, flight paths, tracks and transmissions. The materials used to create these spaces of transformation include paper, graphite, chalk, tissue and holes and metal pins that impregnate the soft paper surface. She writes: ‘I like graphite’s materiality: its mess and dirt as well as its capacity to leave the cleanest, sharpest percussive marks and lines. I feel like I’m forging land formations when I use it, or scattering particles, or spiralling vortices of smoke and water’. Her large drawings point the viewer to a different universe while the small drawings act as charts providing clues and direction.’

Elton Barker:

Editor: New Worlds From Old Texts (Oxford University Press)

‘The image I wanted, then, needed to respect these different disciplinary approaches while at the same time hinting at ways in which they might be combined and intertwined (for interdisciplinary research). And, of course, it needed to be in some way spatial, to suggest the complexity of trying to represent and unpick spatial entities and relations. Richard Rowley of Agile Collective put me on to London-based artist Emma McNally, whose work attempts to “portray essence not as substance... but rather as the result of a process of reciprocal determination, where individual lines, markings, and trajectories are brought to significance through their interrelations with those around them.” After getting her approval, I chose her scratches, traces, spaces . This work on graphite (“a medium that lends itself perfectly to [a] sort of rhythmic making and unmaking. It is a material for palimpsest”: ibid) seemed to me to perfectly capture the spatial palimpsests that many of us were striving to reveal and more closely examine in our texts, while also being provocatively new and overtly relational. Emma later informed me that the very same artwork was used by Ridley Scott as a navigation map in his latest Alien prequel Covenant. If it’s good enough for Ridley...!’