Emma McNally: The Earth is Knot Flat

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 self-contained ‘drawing’, she challenges us to develop our own capacity for complexity. Through this, we can collectively 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 uses 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.

Artist biography 

Born 1969, Essex, McNally lives and works in London. Her graphite drawings, a multitude of different marks, conjure up dynamic weather systems and matter moving through different states. They suggest an attempt to chart shifting systems of immense complexity, drawing on soundings, data visualisations, electronic microscopes, particle collision chambers and satellite imaging. She studied Philosophy and Literature at the University of York before continuing her thinking visually through drawing. For over 20 years McNally supported her drawing in the studio by painting large scale reproductions of Renaissance paintings on the street – including long periods outside York Minster, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London and on the South Bank of the Thames.

Recent group exhibitions include: After Mallarmé, curated by Michael Newman, Large Glass, London (2024); Denniston Hill, Marian Goodman NYC (2023); Afterness, Artangel / National Trust, Orford Ness, UK (2021); 20th Biennale of Sydney, AU (2016), The Form of Form, Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016); Mirrorcity, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2015); Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London (2014). Seeing/Knowing, Kenyon College of Liberal Arts, Ohio, US (2011). In the period 2016–21, McNally withdrew from exhibiting and was involved intensely with political activism. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, US and MONA, AU.