Emma McNally’s Fields, Charts, Soundings Cartographies

Emma McNally‘s work is an artistic cartography of imaginary nodes, network topologies, noise patterns, musical notations. Traces and scatters shape an imaginary, poetic confluence of scientific advances in genetics, neuroscience, physics, molecular biology, computer systems, and sociology

From a descriptive text on her Flickr profile:

“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.”