Emma McNally’s Maps

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 (More)