in progress. . . … . . . .

This year I will be working towards 'The Earth is Knot Flat' ( 2 Oct – 15 Dec 2024 ) at Drawing Room, London

I will be developing the thinking I was doing (with others) for my River drawing ( 'Afterness' / Artangel )

The River drawing will be brought back into flow as part of the installation.

‘The Earth is Knot Flat will be Emma McNally’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and her most ambitious installation to date.

This exhibition uses drawing to think through the materially entangled, interconnected nature of gender, racial and environmental injustices. McNally makes her large drawings in a building constructed for rope making in London’s Woolwich Dockyards and she has a view onto the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery. Both sugar – known in the 18th Century as ‘white gold’ – and rope, are products that represent global entanglements of domination and subjugation. Drawing on this history and the complexity of her Irish/Australian ancestry, the exhibition will be the physical manifestation of the artist’s ongoing conversations with international thinkers such as theorist and poet Fred Moten and physicist Karen Barad: ‘We are gathering to develop more equitable, more just practices towards our shared liberation. We are questioning a linear understanding of time and developing ways to think and speak together about ‘entanglement’ and generative complexity across all categories.’

Cascading from the ceiling in large ‘plates’ to the floor, McNally’s installation will resemble geological and environmental movement, suggesting rock falls, avalanches and shifting tectonics. Torn fragments of drawing floating across the floor are reminiscent of sea ice, glaciers, dust and refuse, whilst suspended woven knots made of wire and string accumulate in clusters overhead. An immersive film, made in collaboration with Manon Schwich, casts light and shadows on the various elements and generates an uncertain atmosphere, a confusing mixture of presence and absence. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to make and share different ways of drawing, using crochet and other creative activities to make their own knots and suspend them; over the duration of the exhibition a growing, multi-authored installation will emerge in the adjacent gallery. Sharing traditions of making, such as Irish Crochet Lace, is a way of understanding history through material production and will form an important, interactive element of the project.

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: 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 and MONA, AU.’

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These are guiding texts I'm thinking with:

'By violating the rule of separability, we are able to displace the most resilient conceptual impediments'

Denise Ferreira da Silva

‘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

‘Love is not a state’

Judith Butler

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

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‘Eytmology of dust’

Inhabiting the ruins…..

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

'..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

nutrient (n.)

"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