April 2008

Emma McNally:

Fields, Charts, Soundings

T1+2 Artspace London January 25 to March 2

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, 2007) – 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.