Artist: Emma McNally

The Earth is Knot Flat is Emma McNally’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and her most ambitious installation to date.

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.’