Emma McNally1's photostream

upcoming:

'Atoms Insects Mountains Stars'
Young Gallery. Salisbury 11/02/12

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

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Current (until March 11 2012)

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

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.'
(text from networkism.org)

*****

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


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' (Suny Press 2012) which will be available in April:

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

upcoming:
My work will be included in
'Hyperdrawing: Between the Lines of Contemporary Drawing' (Taurus Press). June 2012

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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 static's like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking, nor even a group thinking, collectively. It's bigger than that, wider - and more direct. It's like the sound of thought itself, it's hum and rush. Each night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudging the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad--and always mute. It's not until, hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires, his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he's riding on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words start forming: first he jots down the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below these, he begins to transcribe the curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light of his desktop...'

'...Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath the general interference: the atmospherics were atrocious that night. He listened to the whine and crackle, though, right through till morning-- and heard, or thought he heard, among it's breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them'

extracts from 'C' by Tom McCarthy (Jonathan Cape 2011)

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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.

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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

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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.

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atoms..insects..mountains..stars (Deleuze on Messiaen):
'...arranged in so many different ways according to variable relations fo 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'

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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')

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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)

upcoming:
I am delighted to be taking part in a season of audio/visual residencies at Denniston Hill (Southern Catskills, NY) in August 2011. Denniston Hill is managed by a board that includes the artists Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer and architect/academic, Lawrence Chua. John Letourneau is responsible for the daily smooth running. The residencies are being curated by Alec Hanley Bemis.


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.


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