flickeflu.com/photos/35936248@N08

'(tracing) additional courses over spaces that
before were blank/..threading a maze of currents
and eddies..'(Melville. Moby Dick)

'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.


*****


I am delighted to have been nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Visual Arts 2013

www.phf.org.uk/Artists/page.asp?id=286

***

forthcoming:

www.drawingnowparis.com/site/GB/Home,I14100.htm

www.drawingnowparis.com/site/GB/Galleries/Zoom_Gallery,,C...

www.drawingroom.org.uk/biennialfundraisingexhibitions.php


***

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's 'Plays 1' (Faber) is now available.
My drawing 'Double Orbit' has been used for the cover:

www.faber.co.uk/catalog/rebecca-lenkiewicz-plays-1/978057...

****


I am delighted to be ending the year with the offer of a residency at CIll Rialaig, Ballinskelligs in 2013.

I willl be staying in a restored pre-famine cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The cottage is one of seven built right on a cliff on the remote peninsular of Bolas Head on the Ring of Kerry, Ireland.


www.flickr.com/photos/56753145@N02/5748358073/in/faves-em...



****
(text from one of my favourite online resources discovered via Francisco Lopez. A beautiful enfolding of acoustic multiplicities: technological, data, suboceanic animal call, weather, atmospherics, ice-fall):

Typical sounds you may hear in Atka Bay during April: Animals: Weddell Seals (chirps and trills), Blue Whales (chorus at 19-27Hz and pulses ~10Hz), Fin Whales (chorus at 98 Hz), Killer Whales (clicks and whistles 2000-20000 Hz), Humpback Whales (no songs, only short calls), Environment: Calving Ice Shelf (like small splashes, explosions, or roaring thunder), Sea Ice (whining), Passing Icebergs (screaming, crying, breathing and explosive sounds), Storms (broadband hiss), Earthquakes (low frequency roaring <100Hz), Human: Ships (Broadband noise with characteristic spectral lines), RAFOS Source (260 Hz tone at 00:52 UTC); Unknown Sound Sources: The Bioduck (100-300 Hz pulse trains), Natural Electromagnetic Interference: Sferics (clicks above 10000 Hz caused by tropical thunderstorms), Discharges during snow drift (broadband clicks); Technical Crosstalk: Switching Relays (click every full hour), Wind Charger, Data Transmissions, GPS Timestamps (click and buzz every 10 minutes); All data © AWI 2013, Contact: Lars Kindermann

www.awi.de/en/research/research_divisions/climate_science...

****

www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/news/blogs/mead_gallery/emma-...

I have just spent a week in residency at one of the Math's Houses of the Warwick Maths Institute

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_for_Visiting_Mathematicians

There is a room in the house for visiting mathematicians to work in a focused, self-contained environment. The walls in this room are curved and a blackboard for thinking runs the full length. I had a wonderful time drawing on the blackboard and digitally archiving the process of mark-making and erasure until the final day when the drawing was completely removed. A selection of the archived images is included here. It was a pleasure to work on such a unique surface - especially with the traces of all of the previous chalkings of numbers and equations that formed a barely visible filigree.
I will make some 'digital hybrid' images back in the studio.

Many thanks to Colin Sparrow and his colleagues at the Math's Department for their hospitality
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/people/staff/colin_sparrow/
.. to Rebecca Lenkiewicz who was in residency writing a play
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Lenkiewicz
as part of a project facilitated by Ed and Paul at China Plate
www.chinaplatetheatre.com/
with Alan Rivett at the Warwick Arts Centre
www.warwickartscentre.co.uk
and to Chris Thorpe who was gathering material for his latest project.
www.unlimited.org.uk/company/biogs.php
for all the very stimulating conversation. I had a great time.


*****


an inspiring online resource by Paul Prudence who is endlessly generous with his thoughts and research
:
www.dataisnature.com/

****

vimeo.com/user13327096

*****
A pack of wolves, a cacophonous assemblage of starlings in a maple tree when evening falls, a marsh throbbing with frogs, a whole night fizzling with fireflies exert a primal fascination on us. What is fascinated is the multiplicity in us — the human form and the nonhuman, vertebrate and invertebrates, animal and vegetable, the conscious and unconscious movements and intensities in us. Aliens on other planets, galaxies churning out trillions of stars, drops of water showing, under the microscope, billions of squiggling protozoa — these are mesmerizing. What is mesmerized in us are the pulses of solar energy momentarily held and refracted in our crystalline cells, the microorganic movements and intensities in the currents of our inner coral reefs.

Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

******

Rhythm is the emergence of closed ensembles whose elements call for one another like the syllables of a verse, but answer to one another only by activating us. Rhythm is not properly assumed, subsumed...one does not assume a rhythm, make it one’s own by understanding—one participates in it without consent, without freedom. And yet the power and presence of rhythm is in no way unconscious: on the contrary, it intensifies into consciousness, fills and obsesses consciousness. The feeling of intensifying, augmenting power, is joy. Rhythm interests life in spite of itself, but not by offering it utility or meaning; it effects a deconceptualization of reality. And, indeed, it interests, involves, captivates life not even “in spite of itself,” for it effects a depersonalization of the subject, a passage from the self to anonymity. “Through the spirit of music we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual” (Birth of Tragedy, §16).”

— Alphonso Lingis


*****


I received this email from
JF Ptak
historyofideasblog.com
and he has given me permission to include it here. I am very interested in this idea of 'waiting structure'


'..Its a little hard to explain the "missing" part of presented information. I write quite a bit and one of the threads is on missing things--blank, empty and missing--on the blog, a history of those things, a series that can look at everything. As much as there is in the world, and as much as can be seen in our seeable dimensions, these things can in a way just be taking up space in blankness. Which is definitely not a thing with a negative value, necessarily. Well. It's a big topic, but suffice to say that even in a sea of everything there are bits of nothing, and it is interesting to me to know why they might be there, what it is in the structure of the surrounding somethingness that allows them to be. I have been in the history of science/ideas field for a long time, and this sort of observation is very useful.

The point is with your art is that it seems like a waiting structure to me, a place where things can find their proper places, an organizational park for dissected thoughts, maybe. Plus there's all of the found geometries. And they have as much or as little detail as I want. Porphyry's trees without designation. A Borges diagram. cloud chamber x-rays. Particle tracks...'

***


The Contemporary Art Society has purchased my drawing: Carbon Cleaving for the John Creasey Museum in Salisbury

****

'In hyperdrawing: beyond the lines of contemporary art, authors and artists come together to explore the potential of what drawing in contemporary art theory and practice might become. In this follow-up to 2007's drawing now: between the lines of contemporary art, the editors of TRACEY curate contemporary drawing within fine art practice from 2006 through to 2010. Four essays and images from 33 international artists collectively explore the boundaries of the hyperdrawing space, investigating in essence what lies beyond drawing - images that use traditional materials or subjects whilst also pushing beyond the traditional, employing sound, light, time, space and technology. A gallery in book form, hyperdrawing takes drawing beyond the interaction of pencil and paper and traces contemporary adventures in multiple dimensions and alternate realities.'

My work is included in 'Hyperdrawing: Between the Lines of Contemporary Drawing' (IB Taurus 2012)




***

One of my drawings, 'Double Orbit' is being used for the cover of the first volume of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Collected Plays. It will be published by Faber later in the year. Rebecca's version of Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People' will be at the Manhattan Theatre Club at the end of September.

anenemyofthepeoplebroadway.com/

***

`Atoms Insects Mountains Stars'
Selected drawings

www.trinitycontemporary.com/

Trinity Contemporary
29 Bruton Street
London
W1J6QP


Thursday, 12 April 2012 - Friday, 27 April 2012

Opening hours:
Mon - Fri : 10am - 6pm
Sat 14: by appointment
Sat 21: 12am - 6pm

One of the drawings I made whilst a resident at the very beautiful Denniston Hill (Catskills, NY) in August 2011 has been selected by Mary Doyle (Director of The Drawing Room, London) for the show The Curator's Egg Altera Pars at Anthony Reynolds (London).

The drawing was made in my temporary studio - a small hut by a river in the middle of the woods. Many thanks to Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, Lawrence Chua, John Letourneau, Jessica Rankin, Jenny Liu and Beth Stryker for my time there:

Feb 02 - March 03

www.anthonyreynolds.com
www.dennistonhill.org

'Atoms Insects Mountains Stars'
Solo show
Young Gallery/Trinity Contemporary (London). Salisbury 11/02/12 - 24/03/12

www.trinitycontemporary.com

'Kalliphilia' Vegas Gallery London. 02/02/12

www.vegasgallery.co.uk/

***

Current (until March 04 2012)

'Seeing/Knowing'
at Gunds Gallery, Kenyon College Ohio

(Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Benjamin Maus, Camille Utterback, Casey Reas, Diana Cooper, Eduardo Kac, Emma McNally, Jorinde Voight, Julie Mehretu, Julius Von Bismarck, Marius Watz, Mark Lombardi, Matthew Ritchie, Michael Joaquin Grey, Nathalie Miebach Rafael, Lozano-Hemmer):

Curated by Gund Gallery director Natalie Marsh, the inaugural exhibition Seeing/Knowing explores the experience of information in contemporary art. After 50 years of new media culture—the world of TV, the internet, and virtual reality—and 50 years of new media art—creative computer-based and digital expression—technological ways of thinking have permeated the creative processes of artists working in all media. Gathering together works of art from multiple continents, Seeing/Knowing offers a global view of the expanded ways that art represents thought.

www.thegundgallery.org/2011/10/seeingknowing/

www.thegundgallery.org/2011/10/emma-mcnally/



*******

'Networkism is a growing artistic trend, characterized by the portrayal of figurative graph structures—illustrations of network topologies revealing convoluted patterns of nodes and links

First introduced by Manuel Lima in his book Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, Networkism is stimulated by rhizomatic properties like nonlinearity, multiplicity, or interconnectedness, and scientific advances in areas such as genetics, neuroscience, physics, molecular biology, computer systems, and sociology. As a direct consequence of the recent outburst of network visualization, networkism is equally motivated by the unveiling of new knowledge domains as well as the visual representation of complex systems.

The stunning graphite illustrations of Emma McNally convey a sort of cartographic conjecture, with imaginary planes and connections, intersecting squares, circles and dots. These abstract lines, shapes, and patterns make for some striking textures and resemble classic mappings of cyberspace through nodal connections of imagined networks.'
www.networkism.org

(previous re: 'networks':
mags.acm.org/communications/200907/?pg=68#pg68 )

*****

I am delighted that the amazing sound artist Francisco Lopez (whose work I love and often listen to when I'm drawing) has used a detail of one of my drawings for sleeve art on his just released "1980-2010" (Nunn Records) :

www.nuun-records.com/?page_id=654

Francisco is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene.

www.franciscolopez.net/

Manuel Lima's beautiful book 'Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information' (Princeton Architectural Press 2011) is now available.
My work is featured in the chapter "Complex Beauty":

www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/book/

I am also very happy that the philosopher Henry Somers-Hall has used a detail of my drawing Field 5 on the cover of his forthcoming book 'Deleuze, Hegel and the Critique of Representation dialectics of negation and difference' (Suny Press 2012) which will be available in April:

www.sunypress.edu/p-5326-hegel-deleuze-and-the-critique-....

Henry is also co-editor for the 'Cambridge Companion to Deleuze' out in Dec 2012

www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=978052...

***

Nate Martinez and his band 'Thieving Irons' (Brooklyn NYC) are using my drawing as part of the artwork for their wonderful new album 'Behold, This Dreamer!

The album is released June 5 2012:

thievingirons.spinshop.com/details/149137


***

Henry Somers-Hall:

'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.'

******

'The title of the exhibition, Atoms, insects, mountains, stars is inspired by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In his book A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze suggests how through ‘the labour of rhythm’ the composer Messiaen conveys the relations between the infinitely long durations of the stars and the mountains and the infinitely short durations of insects and atoms.

Emma’s interest in philosophy, science and music is also reflected in her extensive and symbolic use of graphite (pencil and graphite powder) made of Carbon, the chemical basis of all known life that recalls the essential and natural bond between the human and the universe.

Some of Emma’s earliest pencil drawings (S6, C2, Field 6, Chambers) are associated with mappings of geological formations and constellations. They appear to be the result of scientific readings yet they have been made intuitively. Their abstract vocabulary has a likeness to musical scores and computer coding, creating a matrix of humming activity where chaos is organised by rhythms and connections.
In her most recent pieces (Carbon cleaving, Carbon Infra sound) McNally has favoured a more physical and almost sculptural approach, pouring pure graphite powder on to large surfaces covered with paper or muslin and hammering nails into them. Shimmering like stars, the nails form part of a network of intricate, repetitive pencil marks, crosses, dashes, dots and lines.

In Carbon Sounding and Carbon Infra sound, 4 A, she uses a heavy wash of graphite and lines of metallic nails to create a primordial, dark space which enfolds continual streams of energy and migration.

Her triptych: Alignment, was conceived after a visit to Stonehenge, inspired by the coexistence of vast chalk plateaus, archeological layouts/sites/paths, a motorway and the Army activity on Salisbury Plain. The Wiltshire landscape has inspired Emma to draw for the first time using chalk. Through a network of white lines McNally stresses the open perspective of the “plainscape”, the past and present means of communications and multiple connections that are taking place around the site. The white tracking on the shadowy background also refers to the celestial observatory function of Stonehenge and to the primitive funerary monument, where rituals were accomplished through music and rhythm.
Emma McNally intertwines and articulates these sources of data to embrace a contemporary vision of the Wiltshire landscape.'
(text PR 'Atoms Insects Mountains Stars' Salisbury Feb-March 2012)



*****


A resonance chamber uses resonance to amplify sound. The chamber has interior surfaces which reflect an acoustic wave. When a wave enters the chamber, it bounces back and forth within the chamber with low loss. As more wave energy enters the chamber, it combines with and reinforces the standing wave, increasing its intensity.

***
A sounding line or lead line is a length of thin rope with a plummet, generally of lead, at its end. Regardless of the actual composition of the plummet, it is still called a "lead."

Sounding lines were widely used in navigation until the development of echo sounding. Ultrasonic depth sounders provide an accurate graphical profile of the depth of the seabed.

The word derives from the Old English sund, meaning swimming, water, sea

***

Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός – rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry" may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to millions of years.

In the performance arts rhythm is the timing of events on a human scale; of musical sounds and silences, of the steps of a dance, or the metre of spoken language and poetry. Rhythm may also refer to visual presentation, as "timed movement through space." and a common language of pattern unites rhythm with geometry.

***

atoms..insects..mountains..stars (Deleuze on Messiaen):
'...arranged in so many different ways according to variable relations of speed, but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how he populated the Gobi desert with insects and stars constituting the becoming music of the world or a diagonal for the cosmos. Messiaen presents multiple chromatic durations in coalescence "alternating between the longest and the shortest in order to suggest the idea of the relations between the infinitely long durations of the stars and mountains and the infinitely short ones of insects and atoms" a cosmic, elementary power that derives above all from the labour of rhythm..' Deleuze/ Guattari 'A Thousand Plateaus'

***

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm (Faulkner 'Absalom! Absalom')

***

My hand which touches the things is itself subject to being touched . 'Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves in the universe that they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it.' (Merleau-Ponty. the intertwined/chaismic)

******


State of Flux: Drawing in London 2011
Trinity Contemporary London
12 - 27 May 2011
with Kate Atkin, James Brooks, Layla Curtis and Juliet Haysom
www.trinitycontemporary.com

'Echoing the idea inherent to Layla Curtis works that “to be is to be in the world”, Emma McNally’s drawings, which could be associated with mappings of constellations appear to be the result of scientific readings. Yet they have been made very intuitively, favouring a very physical, almost sculptural approach. After pouring pure graphite powder on a large sheet of paper, McNally hammers nails into it to draw physically, shimmering shiny dots like stars, to complete a network of repeated and intricate pencil marks, crosses, dashes, dots and lines. This abstract vocabulary common to musical scores and computer data creates a matrix of humming activity where chaos is organised by rhythms and connections.

In Carbon Cleaving her symbolic use of graphite made of Carbon, the chemical basis of all known life, recalls this essential and natural bond between the human and the universe. McNally’s drawing leads us into continual streams of energy, migration and communication. Looking closer, some geometrical figures are evocative of an electronic circuit through which signals can be amplified, computation can be performed and data can be moved around. Everything looks relational, she intertwines the self with the universe that now encompasses a new virtual and digital dimension in a constant state of flux.'
(from press release text)



Art Monthly magazine
exhibition review
Emma McNally:
Fields, Charts, Soundings

by Peter Suchin

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.

Perhaps these drawings – there are some 20 works in the show (all pencil on paper) – can hold such a multiplicity of allusions because the marks of which they are comprised are themselves extremely diverse, with their use of scale (ranging from the vast Field 1, measuring 229 x 304.5 cm, to pieces on A4 paper) also adding to their suggestive disposition. McNally is technically very inventive, generating with the pencil a multiplicity of lines, dots, scratches or tracks, building up individual works from literally thousands and thousands of marks that frequently make up specific units or shapes – thick, solid circles; tiny, sharp dots; wiggly yet rigid lines; equilateral triangles laid point to point; blocked-in squares containing crosses – all overlaid and underpinned with neat grids and other reticulated structures that run across the entire surface. The result is that the drawings, whatever else they might seem to represent, can also be considered as archives or storehouses of what linguists term iterable units, forms akin to letters of the alphabet that may be used to produce meaning; in short a kind of writing. But although a key aspect of languages comprising distinct units is that they employ a strictly restricted (and thereby repeatable) lexicon of signs, the reading of McNally’s work as writing in the conventional sense is thwarted by the fact that the marks used are both fixed and fluid. While a substantial number of the signs McNally makes are repeated over and over again, many of them are not so much iterable as amorphous, instances of scribble or at least what one might term a bastardised version of a sign or distinct unit. To take the analogy further, such forms are like handwriting that is so unclear and unstructured as to render the message unreadable. Such imprecision (though it is of course here combined with a plethora of precise marks) is a move towards what Roland Barthes referred to as the signifier without the signified, to the playful indulgence in and deployment of the pure sign.

This combination of iterable and non-iterable markings gives McNally’s work, placed as it is between coded representation and loose but allusive drawing, a productive ambiguity that serves to remind us that, in spite of all the clichéd chatter in art schools and in the artworld proper to the effect that art is a language, it is no such thing. McNally’s drawings suggest writing, encoding and its concomitant decoding or decipherment, but they are visual works, not speech or writing by other means.

If there is a hint of the linguistic in ‘Fields, Charts, Soundings’, then there is also some reference to the musical, clearly in the last word of the title, but also in the drawings’ similarity to the musical scores of Cornelius Cardew and John Cage. McNally’s pseudo-scores are much more labour-intensive than those by these composers. They demonstrate immense labour, of time passed in the studio; time which passes again for the viewers who choose to give their full attention to the finished work. On occasion, certain patches of a given piece’s surface can feel overworked, as though the pencil has got stuck at that point, spiralling around in deep abandonment across an area only a few inches square. But from a distance this anomaly, suspension or ‘delay’ is not a problem, providing spaces of intensity within the broader plane of paper.

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.

Peter Suchin is an artist, critic and curator.

*****

Fields, Charts, Soundings
Ana Balona de Oliveira

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
In ‘Fields, Charts, Soundings’ Emma McNally investigates possibilities of semiotic connections and disconnections through a visually and conceptually dense use of pencil on paper. Her large and small-scale drawings (placed both vertically on walls and horizontally on glass-covered tables as relational objects non-hierarchically occupying a layered space) offer themselves to the viewer as surfaces or sites for rhythmic relations of graphite marks disruptively connected in gatherings, collisions, swirls and dispersals that are both geometric and chaotic. There seems to be a permanent flux of disquietingly pulsing energy achieved through these conflicting highly organised and extremely fleeting forces. To use Hal Foster’s words while describing the model of the rhizome, McNally’s graphite-marking appears ‘to ramify like a weed or a rhizome ... through mutations of connection and disconnection’. The fact that McNally is able to attain such an effect through drawing is undoubtedly a constant source of bewilderment and reflection f Only in appearance categorising her works as ‘fields’, ‘charts’ and ‘soundings’ – for a chart could also be seen as a field or sounding and vice-versa – the artist ironically plays with the notion of stable definition through the use of dictionary entry and explaining footnote (in this case for ‘carbon’) in the accompanying text of the exhibition. At the same time, and by these same means, she presents multiple and open possibilities of meaning for ‘field’, ‘chart’ and ‘sounding’ and shows the multi-layered relevance of carbon in her work. In fact, besides being one of McNally’s major working materials, carbon also offers, as a chemical element, a possible analogy for the multiple ‘mutations of connection and disconnection’ played out in her drawings. The artist has herself explained this relevance:
‘Carbon is very important to me for many reasons related to all of this – the rhythms of formation played out infinitely because of its unique ability to bond with other atoms, its relation to energy, its physical nature (made of layers that have weak bonds between them but strong bonds between the atoms on a particular layer: when I use graphite it sheds these layers, they can also be erased and leave a smudge or trace of matter that is then part of what results from the process). Carbon allotropes also cover the spectrum from softest – graphite – to one of the hardest - diamond. It can be an excellent conductor of heat and electricity in one form and an insulator in the other. I love the models that describe its forms, the fullerenes chains etc. I would like to do drawings where the weave incorporates these many rhythms of carbon as well as a constant disintegration and shaking that continually prevents the weave from closing and defining.’
However, as McNally acknowledges, this is just one possible analogy amongst many others given not only by herself but also by the viewers of her layered works, such as those of aerial views, battlefield maps, geological formations, oceanic charts, disease transmissions, animal migratory routes, molecule structures, black holes, etc. As in the similarity between the processes of the radically differing micro-cosmos of the atom and macro-cosmos of the star formation, that which above all interests the artist is the idea of flow within difference and the recognition of the impossibility of stable and totally definable boundaries. It is precisely here that McNally’s work becomes philosophically political, for through it she is claiming for an increased awareness of the delusional establishment of identities and certainties. By means of exploring the dynamic of formation through rhythm and taking into account diverse processes of graphic deconstruction (which, in a Derridian sense, does not mean destruction but rather de-layering or exposing of the layers, as in a geological excavation that attains no foundations or a Nietzschian genealogical investigation that finds no original beginning, no essentialist origin, order, arque), McNally disrupts unity and incorporates alterity, friction and conflict.
In this exhibition the artist has developed her relational and layered graphic strategies, for now she has not only drawn with graphite, but also by bending the paper itself and including the traces of this gesture into the drawing process. In some of the works she has superimposed two layers of paper into one single drawing, thereby creating tension between the overlaid, slightly translucent surfaces, whose marks simultaneously combine and counter each other. Also, McNally dismantles the opposition of the white surface and black mark by exploring their reversal. Other examples of works show the tension between the movement depicted and the fixation procured by several pins holding the sheets of paper together. The sometimes quasi violent graphite-marking that perforates the paper, the use of the pins per se, as well as the third- dimensional residues of the action of folding/unfolding generally contribute to the tactile strength of the work, thus pushed beyond the flatness of the surfaces and pure abstraction, and enriched with new semiotic-political openness.


******


Mummery+ Schnelle

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.


Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to announce an exhibition of the drawings of Emma McNally.

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 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 organizations 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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Emergent Cartographies:

Cartographic conjecture, emergent systems and experimental musical notation all coalescent in the space planes of Emma McNally’s drawings. The pieces, done with graphite on paper, are dense with interconnected and intersecting shapes - squares, circles and dots rhythmically layered to create dense three-dimensional spaces. Biological and cellular processes are also evoked, Apotosis, being a fine example. Our friend wikipedia informs us that Apotosis ‘is the process of programmed cell death (PCD) that may occur in multicellular organisms. Maps and mappings also figure heavily – imagined paths, trajectories and psychogeographic boundaries of possible journeys are implied. Beyond mappings of physical space we also find notations of dataspace in the nodal connections of imagined networks. Those familiar with the classic mappings of cyberspace will immediately fill comfortable with the recursive branchings in the piece Contagion Cage. All pieces imply the micro and macroscopic, often simultaneously, from teeming constellations of axons and dendrites to the conjunctions of celestial cells and organelles.

www.dataisnature.com

Paul Prudence

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Fields Chart Soundings (T1+2 artspace London)

'(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, weather 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.

*'carbon' (pronounced /’karben/) is a chemical element with the symbol C. It is a nonmetallic, tetravalent element that presents several allotropic forms of which the best known ones are graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon. Carbon is one of the few elements known to man since antiquity. The name "carbon" comes from Latin language carbo, coal, and in some Romance languages, the word carbon can refer both to the element and to coal. It is the 4th most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is ubiquitous in all known life forms, and in the human body it is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.

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Cartographers in the 12th century using engraving, brush and ink couldn’t have perceived the technological momentum which would allow modern maps to be digitized directly from high-definition photographs taken by satellites over 100 miles above the Earth. A map, much like a photograph, encapsulates the essence of an object otherwise in motion, as the continents continue their slow blossom over dancing waters.

Emma McNally is a London-based Visual Artist. Her academic background comes from degrees she earned at York University in English and Philosophy. Her drawings are built with layers of precise markings; between which there is a constant murmur. She pushes the range of value uncharacteristically deep and wide for the media. The scale and presentation of her pieces alludes to wall-mounted maps, but the surfaces sometimes contain crease marks and blemishes, as if at some point they were used for navigation en route.

The slow, silent movements of the continental plates seem mostly innocuous, but are instigated by heat, pressure, gravity and magnetism of extreme measures underneath the surface. The cerebral cortex is ridged and grey, like the surface of a dead moon; and only with much closer investigation can the immense activity within be noticed. Where Mcnally’s works appear cartographic, what they chart appears to be internal. Nerve cells are relaying the message of another, dendrites absorbing, axons firing, all in the slightest fraction of a second— carefully frozen in time with graphite, carbon, and nails.

Jacob Van Loon (artchipel)




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... The first mark is inevitably followed by the second because they are of one element, elaborated in two modes as two entities - thunder and lightning are allotropic analogues.

Aware of the allotropic properties of carbon and it's common manifestation as graphite, Emma McNallly's C10 and F4 bear repetitive marks and signs, but these do not accumulate to provide a single system of meaning. Instead, repetition unfolds difference; McNally's surfaces become an allotrope of the sign. There is a parallel drawn in her work between material and the manner of it's emergence, between the sooty carbon graphite on the surface and the complexity of mark-making and folding that moves the inscribed paper toward a signification it never reaches. McNally's works perform signification in multiple modes, calling to us, compelling us to look, listen, perhaps touch - they interpellate us as subjects emerging in the elaboration of meaning in and through time…

In between time

...Described variously as fields, charts and soundings, McNally's drawings resist simplistic classification and operate between conventional systems and modes in their visual qualities. A complicated geography of graphite marks on paper, they suggest contour maps, star charts, musical scores and mechanical diagrams of various sorts, but they do not resolve as any or all of these in particular. Rather, McNally's drawings are contingent constellations of dots and lines, foldings and signs that converge and cluster but refuse to delineate boundaries or give directions. They instead remind us of drawing's exceptional ability to materialise thresholds between disciplinary fields or conceptual territories while engaging with many modes of making at once. Poised pivotally between systems of signification, the works are both and neither writing and drawing, they extend the interstitial dynamics of their material and manner in and through an interval; they elaborate drawings threshold state in and through drawing… they elaborate the 'hyper' of drawing.

...As a process of articulation and articulation of and through differance, I am suggesting that Hyperdrawiang offers the potential to unravel the polarities that conventionally mark sexual difference and materialise an intertwining at the interstices of masculine/feminine that can be generative and replete with meaning, rather than troubled by lack. The interval opened in and through gender|time|drawing elaborates emergent affinities and generates the new...


If we had world enough and time

...McNally's drawings imply the potential for infinite extension in their materials and their elaboration. For instance, their scale can vary dramatically: C10 is barely a square metre, F4 is more than three metres square. This is important to their interpretation, since it undermines conceptually their physical parameters, their boundaries. In addition, they can be encountered hung on walls, placed on tables or left on the floor; this multiplies the possibilities through which we understand the works as meaningful objects - drawings, charts/maps, diagrams. They are (potentially) infinite mark-making systems that, simultaneously, confound systematic thinking; they are the world as map of the world...

..Drawing intricate messages in pencil on paper that borrow from common modes of mark-makiing whilst introducing subtle shifts in their form is performative, in the strong sense, in the very sense that has been used most critically to rework presumed gender categories. Drawing's performativity is a becoming that radically destabilises fixed notions of identity and meaning and makes us, as participants, reiterate and re-perform ourselves as we encounter and engage it. McNally's works bring forth that which they draw; they instantiate the (hyper)interval between modes of drawing|knowing. As they turn and change direction, leaving erratics strewn across their surfaces, they defy the easy logic of fixed signification as surely as sexual difference inevitably slips the net of identity politics in its multiple and infinite elaborations. Time gender and drawing yet again conspire to surprise...

extracts from Marsha Meskimmon's essay
'Elaborate Marks: Gender|Time|Drawing' in
Hyperdrawing; Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art
(Taurus 2012)

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Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible... It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible.

Gerhard Richter

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Structure is perceived through the incidency of menace at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision...structure can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only it's supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In a way shaking in relation to the whole (from sollus in archaic Latin "the whole" and from "citare" to put in motion
Derrida Writing and Difference

"There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. [...] We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development)."
Deleuze


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vimeo.com/user13327096