Writing:
'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. Presenting what we might describe as a figuration of forces rather than of things,
McNally's work at once both points to the singularity of the processes encountered in the world through a keen sense of the relative position of traces on the canvas and the particularity of graphite as a medium, whilst also developing a schematics of process which, precisely because it eschews direct reference to any particular system, hints at a coherence of process at work in divergent structures. In this sense, it presents aesthetically the priority of relation over subject that has dominated the structuralist and post-structuralist movements in philosophy. In showing that the rejection of representational figuration does not lead to chaos or arbitrariness, but to a new kind of ordering, 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.
Finally, 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.'
Henry Somers-Hall co editor ‘Cambridge Companion to Deleuze’
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The often large-scale graphite and charcoal drawings of Emma McNally are regularly likened to maps and charts, and while this is only part of the story, the comparison provides a useful point of entry into her intricate practice. A work such as Scratches Traces Spaces (2015) - a digital inversion of a drawing - resembles an aerial diagram or annotated satellite view of some unknown site of great significance, like a vast military base, covered with layer upon layer of data, the cartographers callipers, compass and ruling pen evoked through the myriad marks, lines, dots and dashes that the artist painstakingly employs. The imagination is allowed plenty of scope to interpret what the eyes see; whether flight paths ors walking routes, telecommunication signals or bombing targets, the topography is defined, demarcated , catalogued. Graphic boxes and strips function as de facto labels., simulating text, adding to the sense that reconnaissance and data analysis are the primary objectives. While warfare, power, and control in the digital era spring to mind, this could just as easily be a chart mapping distant galaxies or the results of some deep sea survey. ... The ambiguously titled SG (2019) looks like the kind of image found in a book about urban planning, charting how a village grew into a town and then a city, or revealing something about the demographics in specific geographical areas. McNally is a magician of infographics, creating the illusion of visual systems giving us rich, open-ended abstractions that evoke thoughts on both macro and micro levels, fro atoms to nebulae, individuals to civilisations, milliseconds to millennia........
While some works are strikingly graphic, others are elemental verging on the sublime. The dark and brooding Choral Field 9 (2016), from a series of twelve imposing graphite works, triggers thoughts of landscapes and harsh weather, such as desert storms or forest fires seen from ground level, volcanic eruptions of storm clouds viewed from the air. The drama and power of the natural world can be keenly sensed. This body of work was made in McNally's studio on West India Dock on the bank of the Thames in London, not only inviting analogies to water -waves crashing or powerful currents - but to other, often invisible forces, such as magnetic fields, electrical currents, or sound waves. The musical reference in the title suggests that the polyphony of a choir is akin to the symphony of sound in the natural world, and the artist's complex visual vocabularies orchestrate this idea with both gusto and finesse. A self-taught artist whose interest and passion for drawing developed alongside her academic studies in the fields of philosophy, McNally takes the viewer along on her exploration of the universe - of waves particles and beyond..’
Matt Price ‘Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing’ (Phaidon 2021)
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‘Imagine that the history of the world dates from the day when there was an encounter of two atoms, where two vortices, two chemical dances combine.’
Paul Cézanne to Joachim Gasquet
When considering McNally’s work, an analogy can be made between experimental art and experimental science. In the late 1890s C.T.R Wilson built a chamber in order to reproduce atmospheric phenomena of the real world – clouds – in the laboratory. But fellow scientists working alongside Wilson observed something other than artificial clouds in his chamber. Visible in the condensation produced there were the tracks of real, very small things that had never been observed before – sub-atomic particles. This transformation of the meteorologist’s cloud chamber into the physicist’s bubble chamber has been described as a change from experimentation that mimics nature to one that takes nature apart.
McNally describes her drawings as chambers. In them she tracks basic connections in matter. Waves of forces play out through time and this 'time' is compressed into each drawing and each drawing becomes the trace of this ‘time’, a footprint suggesting that something was once present, or felt, or otherwise important. In the main work in this exhibition, Field 4, McNally seeks to create a sort of non-hierarchic multiple 'space', with no stable or definable boundaries, incorporating the micro-cosmos of the atom and the macro-cosmos of the star formation in a complex junction, intersection or spatial hybrid. Enfolding and unfurling, humming composite polyrhythmic spaces emerge from the different percussive rhythms and organisations of marks that McNally lays down.
McNally works with different forms of graphite and the multi-layered relevance of carbon is very important to the making of her work and to its meaning. Carbon is an essential element in the make up of individual human bodies and of the universe. It has a unique ability to bond with other atoms and can be an excellent conductor of heat and electricity in one form, and an insulator in another. For McNally, using graphite allows for a sort of material entanglement, or intertwining, of the 'self' and the 'world', echoing the idea inherent to phenomenology that to be is to be in the world. The constant erasures and rubbings out in her working method are a form of continual transforming and becoming - a combining or knotting in of the self and the world where everything is radically relational and in a constant state of shifting dynamic.
- Andrew Mummery
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‘concert of small sounds’:
'I like hearing about how if you slow down a phrase of bird song (time.. across scales.. across spaces) you hear the micro rhythmic textures.. all the complexity of information.. the micro pulse that makes up the macro music of the phrase we hear.. all that information carried.. the nuance.. the same with the clicking of the whales.. immense complexity.. rhythmic sound fields.. transmission through water.. these huge whales transmitting and receiving in the midst of a concert of sound waves from all directions... with their bodies.. these small sounds though.. trying to think about cleaving across scales.. knotting... through time... so that a line or rhythm is pulsed with pencil .. concurrent with another line that pulses an erasure, an absencing.. a sort of drawing under erasure... so that absence/presence never get to be anything than a dance.. cleaving... and then .. through time.. to weave around this a fugue of rhythms... a rope, a skein, a knot.. with the rubbing/erasure constantly enfolded so each line of pulse is rubbed into the durational rhythm... it's one of the differences between drawing and writing (or is it??) that this process happens in time.... like Derrida's intertext.. it's what I recognise in your writing.. this enfolding.. this polyrhythm.. no point at which there is foundation or ground.. but weaving.. dancing.. spinning..singing.. rhythm.. a kind of writing? drawing...'
(McNally with Fred Moten - correspondence)
- - - - - - - - - - —
FIELDS CHARTS SOUNDINGS
'(tracing) additional courses over spaces that
before were blank/..threading a maze of currents
and eddies..'(Melville)
'field'
the range of any series of actions or energies
region of space in which forces are at work: the
locality of a battle: the battle itself: a wide
expanse: the area visible to an observer at one time:
a system or collection.
'chart'
a marine or hydrographical map exhibiting part of the
sea or other water with the islands, contiguous
coasts, soundings, currents etc: an outline map,curve,
or a tabular statement giving information of
any kind.
'sounding'
to measure the depth of; to probe: to try to discover
the inclinations, thoughts etc. to take soundings:
to dive deep, as a whale.
In Emma McNally's work dense layers of carbon* on
paper create fields which offer themselves up to
meaning: planes, vectors, topoi are overlaid, or
coexist with swarms, shoals, marks laid out in
rhythmic sequence.
The effect is of a continuous flux formed by a
congruence of information systems: neural networks,
contagion maps, sonar soundings, weathers systems,
water currents, charts plotting the migratory habits
of deep-ocean mammals.
Focusing on rhythm as an expression of the dynamic
of forming/unforming, McNally thinks this through
graphically by highly charged percussive mark-making.
Lines carry force, like the pulse of an ECG or a
measure of seismic activity.
Ways in which the 'matter' or 'noise' of charged
marks (unclaimed by frequencies or channels) combine,
disperse and recombine into gatherings of static are
explored. Passage is forged between differing
rhythmic expressions: highly regularised, geometric
systems of marks enter into configurations with
chaotic swarms and fugitive marks.
Regularised, centralising and defining forces are
disrupted, subverted and deterritorialised. The
nomadic and fugitive are subject to forces that
capture
and formalise. Monolithic and viral tendencies
mutually infiltrate.
Overall the attempt is made to maintain a state of
flow, of passage between these forces where both are
in danger of overrunning but are constantly overthrown
- with the resulting mutations and proliferations
played out.
Fields Chart Soundings exhibition text
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
McNally’s drawing is a rhythmic sounding of complexity, entanglement and turbulence across scales, times and spaces. She is attempting to develop capacity and resilience around “choreo-thinking, choral-thinking, eco-thinking, thinking with”: to radically disrupt the concept of the Individual, the Subject.
Her work has been used across contexts to visualise complex spaces - including architecture, physics, music, ecology, politics, information networks, sci-fi, mathematics, archeaology, geography, philosophy.
McNally drums up polyphonous, polyrhythmic fields of activity in carbon: figure/ground is actively blurred; multitudes of disparate marks, evoking myriad spaces, whirl concurrently. Noise and signal are continually scrambled to produce generative sites. Making and unmaking, mark and erasure hold equal, interchangeable status and conditions are created for new possibilities to emerge.
Listening to sound from across sources - music of all categories, field recordings - is constant. The distinction between the visual and the sonic is actively undone through drawing.
Dynamic weather systems of graphite conjure matter migrating, cycling across states: water - torrential, turbulent, roiling, falling, rippling - sea, ice, rain, cloud, mist; carbon as smoke, coal, fall out; desert storms and rainforest fires; the weaving and unweaving of DNA. The choreography of spinning, spiralling.
Place as chorus, as dance, as rhythm.
The polyvalency of charts, soundings, screens, data visualisations, notations are employed: radar, sonar, telescopes, electron microscopes, surveillance, satellite imaging… ‘Readings’ index gatherings and dispersals of matter across scales, spaces, velocities, times - particle collision chambers, constellations, deep sea mapping, global C02 imaging, internet networks, telecommunications, city-flows intermingle into complex knots, fugues, skeins, weaves, textile. Binaries, hierarchies, borderings, categories are all actively undone and scrambled.
Non linearity. Entanglement. Fellowship in the blur.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
'One of the exhibits in the Embassy of the Real will be Film by Samuel Beckett. Here is the oft-quoted last line of Beckett’s book The Unnamable:
‘You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on.’
The reason I’m starting with this is that it focuses on a condition. It’s a sort of diagram. The condition is that we can’t escape from ‘going on’, from reaching, desiring, living – we can’t just stop. But we can’t fall back on old narratives and structures that are deeply unsatisfactory, riddled with compromised power dynamics. Neither can we go ‘forward’ into promises and seductions of false utopias and homecomings. It leaves us in a stuttering, stammering, flailing place. Unmoored, disoriented, dislocated and – in the digital age – overwhelmed and urgently negotiating the blurred realm between the supposed free play of simulacra and the gravitational drag of representation. But it’s a place that’s not without great potential for generating new conditions for thinking differently.
The Embassy of the Real seems to be opening up a labile place, an in-between place, where rhythmic forces of disruption, of making and unmaking, organising and disorganising, are going on. Instead of attempts at mastery or escape, attempts are being made to think relationally, rhythmically, dynamically. Holding patterns are being opened where resilience can be developed around radical uncertainty. They are spaces of risk and encounter where new combinations, assemblages, constellations and trans-codings can be experimented with.
Monsters and polymorphous hybrids are being constructed that can traverse spaces: they send out tentacles, code, spores, Morse, polyrhythmic transmissions through all sort of spaces – race, gender, animal, technological, ecological. A capacity for a more polyrhythmic way of thinking across systems is being developed: ‘choreographic thinking’, to use William Forsythe’s words, where unmaking is as important as making, and both are in complex, kinetic, dynamic relation.
In Donna Haraway’s text ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in which she rejects boundaries between human–animal–machine (and disrupts thinking around gender), she says: ‘Grammar is politics by another means.'
- McNally (20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue)
******
extended text from conversation with Himali Singh Soin for Artforum:
'I think of drawing as something active, performative, constantly unfolding. My drawings are middle spaces, sites or fields of activity where I am attempting to find passage, to feel my way, to probe, touch, excavate, navigate, plumb. I’m trying to traverse all sorts of spaces and times, all sorts of states of matter and across scales. They are fields of relation, of emergence.
I'm trying to open up a clearing where as many different ways of thinking about space, time, matter, can be brought into rhythmic relations, to generate emergent, complex organisations through the making..where forces can be at play making and unmaking, gathering, dispersing, disrupting, building, destroying, asserting, obliterating, erasing... a weather system of graphite.
I want the spaces to be polyphonous, multiple, complex, dynamic. I want these spaces to be as much constructed from stuttering, stammering, hesitations, uncertainties, probings, flailings and confusions as robust, bold assertions and discharges of energy: for forces of doubt and certainty, absence and presence, to be in constant dynamic relation.
The drawings are fugitive, heterogenous spaces: grey areas. I'm trying to constantly disrupt the figure/ground relation to make blurred spaces where the conditions of focusing are undone. The drawings are the turbulence between noise and signal. They are a space of difference and deferral, a space of encounter.
Although they are suggestive of scientific readings, so many different sorts of 'reading' are brought into the text of the the drawing that they are scrambled. I suppose I am trying to make broadband spaces where signals at multiple frequencies are being transmitted and received - including those not usually within 'range': sonar, ultraviolet.. the very fast and the very slow. I mine all sorts of ways of thinking visually about space and time. I like Deleuze's phrase 'atoms, insects, mountains, stars'. I really love the beautiful images generated by the sciences that suggest so many different spaces and times - the spiral paths of the particles in bubble chambers, infinitely fast and small; the 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 quantum scale events so fleeting and also 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 the aerial view images of the Nasca Lines, airports in use and obsolete that are reminiscent of the Nasca Lines, images of aerial view of ancient civilisations that have been covered over because the water source that was the seed of their emergence dried up and became extinct.
I constantly listen to sound when I draw - from the white noise of rainfall, field recordings from all environments, I love the sound artist Francisco Lopez - the humming and buzzing of his 'buildings of New York' for example, I love the transmissions from the hydrophones under the Antarctic Ice, live streamed on the internet, as well as all sorts of music. I try to attend as closely as possible to the sound and to transcribe it's rhythms into the drawing, to make a sort of seismograph. I love all of these sorts of 'readings': seismographs, spectrographs, visual representations of musical notation, data, code, morse, glyphs and inscriptions.
I try to bring very different ways of thinking rhythmically about space into relation within the drawing and sound/music helps me to do this. 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, molecules, stars, shoals, electronic pulses, particles, networks. I want the drawings to be intertextual, textile.. polyrhythmic weavings being made and unmade.
I want there to be as much 'time' enfolded into the drawing as possible, from the shortest, fastest to the long and slow. I want to time time and space space - incantatory.. to rhythmically conjugate and to drum up. I am making dark regions of lost time, passed time, histories, the repressed, buried, hidden, obscured, forgotten: active rememberings and forgettings.. When I build up dense areas of information in graphite it accumulates and becomes compressed, compacted, obscure.. dark, potent, encrypted like coal, peat or black oil. This density acts as a dark engine in the drawing, emitting dark signals. There are questions of loss, of memory, of aftermath, of the material heat and draw and potency they exert. There are questions of desire, longing, separation, reaching… also 'clearings', emptinesses, vacancies, voids, 'black outs' that create the conditions for arrivals, new time, future possibilities for emergence.
Graphite is a medium that lends itself perfectly to this sort of rhythmic making and unmaking. It is a material for palimpsest, constructed from physical layers that shed easily. It is very susceptible to touch from the most quiet, nuanced, whispering of marks, the freely and energetically gestural, cool 'scientific' diagrammatic depersonalised marks, notation, glyphs, lines through to the violence of pencils that scratch, gouge, probe, bore, excavate, pencils loaded into electric drill and jigsaws
that churn and dig: marks that cut and marks that stitch, marks that damage and destroy and marks that construct, heal, generate.
Graphite powder can be dropped onto primed paper and the impact frozen like a bomb crater. An unmediated 'moment', a graphite event instant in time that carries a very different sort of heat and energy than the sort gathered in dark layerings and obscure markings that have been rubbed and sanded and compacted down and are no longer available to deciphering that are no longer available to be looked at at all.. All of these states of matter of graphite, these emergent organisations, are in a state of 'exchange' like a city or a psyche or the carbon and water cycles where nothing disappears and everything returns or persists and insists in one form or another. I like the quote from Faulkner 'nothing ever happens once and is finished'.
I like to think of carbon in different states: coal, diamond, smoke, black oil, - a material that is both an insulator and a conductor.. and water in all its states: ice, snow, mist, rain, vapour, torrential, oceanic, still, deep fleeting. One of my favourite films is Tarkovsky's Stalker.. the way water, time, desire, loss, longing, memory play out in the film-time-space.
Graphite maps, unfolds, describes and returns to dust in the drawings in systems of exchange. I want them to be humming graphite sound-fields: vibratory, oscillatory, many-voiced, assertions and hesitations but also full of silences, voids, ghosts. residues and remainders. Intimate - about touch - and also distant. A weather of all these things. A space of contagion, contamination that tunes, detunes, retunes, receives, transmits, scrambles, orders, disorders, makes and unmakes.'
click on image below for opening talk for 3 day seminar on ‘Vocabularies of the Metropolis' at Federal University of Rio De Janeiro:
“..a woman’s infinite mourning is something that haunts everyone... each time there is a kind of “braid” of voices making it plurivocal - this word has several meanings, in fact - a plurivocal quality that works, laboriously or not, on each voice. For instance, here, we were talking about several individuals, several women, and Lorca, and all those ghosts that come to haunt the same place, and that in a way we take onto ourselves at the moment of mourning, at the moment of contemplation, which we mentioned earlier, it must be that these ghosts - which are both masculine and feminine voices - several qualities of voice, several registers of feminine voices, compose together get tangled up or braid together. In a certain way, whenever we speak, whenever I speak, whenever an “I” speaks, this “I” itself is constituted, made possible in its identity of “I”, by this tangling of voices. One voice inhabiting another, in a way, haunting the other. And I think that repression, all repression … begins at the place where one tries to stifle a voice or to reduce this tangle, this braid, to one voice only: a kind of monologic.
The multiplicity of voices right from the word go, spells open house for ghosts, revenants, the return of that which is repressed, excluded, debarred. So I would try to group together the multiplicity of voices, the haunting, the spectrality, and also everything we’ve been talking about for a while... For this democratic space to open, it would take everyone, each citizen, that in everyone this multiplicity of voices be liberated as far as possible. It would take every last citizen to handle within these problems of voice, of sexual differences, of ghosts, etc. in order to be able to handle them as they should outside. If I am tyrannical within myself I would tend to be the same outside. That’s why politics also involves a kind of self-analysis, a kind of self experience. If you don’t deal with your unconscious well, if you are not constantly analysing yourself, the exercise of political responsibility will suffer.” - Derrida
