Emma McNally scrambles the elements of drawing, generating multi-dimensional disruptive works that draw attention to the entangled complexity of existence in an age of extractive capitalism and environmental breakdown. By exploding the idea of a unitary ‘drawing’, she develops the capacity for complexity needed to imagine alternatives to individualised ways of being that lead to domination, subjugation and destruction.
McNally takes the raw materials of drawing – paper, graphite, gum arabic, kaolin – and upends them: crumpling, folding, twisting, perforating, scoring and rotating these components to produce large-scale, undulating works that tumble into the gallery like rock debris deposited by a glacier, pocked with cavities and recesses for nestling in. With no front or back, up or down, these surfaces are covered with a carbon patina, caked-on like soot or built up with an accumulation of mark-making – tangles of eddying ellipses or staccato scratches made using the hand and machines such as sanders or drills. Smaller works fidgeted together from wires, mesh and crochet are suspended in the air like cobwebbed clouds.
These works interact with each other rhythmically like notes in a score, without dominating logic or boundaries, forming a sensory ensemble. They are informed by geological processes, weather patterns, coral formations, planetary movements, atom bombs – a ‘complex topography’ of intricate systems in which each part is inescapably interconnected to the other. For McNally, this non-hierarchical approach challenges the ‘rational’ mindset of post-Enlightenment thinking, which used classification and categorisation as colonial, capitalist tools to dominate, subjugate and extract. Only by moving away from this atomised, binary approach towards a social ‘thinking-together’, that disrupts the idea of the artist, the individual and the self, can we create the conditions for resilience, consciousness and collectivity in which ‘the otherwise becomes possible.’
The Earth is Knot Flat will be Emma McNally’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and will feature embedded film projections made in collaboration with Manon Schwich. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to share in different ways of drawing and making over the duration of the exhibition.
Etymologies of Foam and Dust is a book published to coincide with The Earth is Knot Flat. Designed by Joe Hales, it includes an essay by Aya Nassar, an interdisciplinary scholar who writes about memory, material and post-colonial cityness. Generously supported by Jane Hamlyn and James Lingwood and others who wish to remain anonymous.
Drawing Room / Tannery Arts, Unit 1b New Tannery Way, 58 Grange Road, Bermondsey, London, SE1 5WS Dates: 2 October – 15 December 2024
Admission: Free.
Website: www.drawingroom.org.uk
