Emma McNally/FIELDS, CHARTS, SOUNDINGS
Exhibition: 25 January to 2 March
Private View: Thursday 24 January, from 7 to 9 pm
'(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. This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon).
- Installation view
