The Earth is Knot Flat will be Emma McNally’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK and her most ambitious installation to date.
This exhibition uses drawing to think through the materially entangled, interconnected nature of gender, racial and environmental injustices. McNally makes her large drawings in a building constructed for rope making in London’s Woolwich Dockyards and she has a view onto the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery. Both sugar – known in the 18th Century as ‘white gold’ – and rope, are products that represent global entanglements of domination and subjugation. Drawing on this history and the complexity of her Irish/Australian ancestry, the exhibition will be the physical manifestation of the artist’s ongoing conversations with international thinkers such as theorist and poet Fred Moten and physicist Karen Barad.
Cascading from the ceiling in large ‘plates’ to the floor, McNally’s installation will resemble geological and environmental movement, suggesting rock falls, avalanches and shifting tectonics. Torn fragments of drawing floating across the floor are reminiscent of sea ice, glaciers, dust and refuse, whilst suspended woven knots made of wire and string accumulate in clusters overhead. An immersive film, made in collaboration with Manon Schwich, casts light and shadows on the various elements and generates an uncertain atmosphere, a confusing mixture of presence and absence. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to make and share different ways of drawing, using crochet and other creative activities to make their own knots and suspend them; over the duration of the exhibition a growing, multi-authored installation will emerge in the adjacent gallery. Sharing traditions of making, such as Irish Crochet Lace, is a way of understanding history through material production and will form an important, interactive element of the project.