'Choral Fields 1-6' of MIRRORCITY in London ponders the urban city's rhythmic flow

For as long as digital technology continues to creep into every part of our daily lives, so will the discussion regarding its impact on everyday reality.

Over at London's Hayward Gallery, the MIRRORCITY exhibition features the multimedia works of London-based emerging and established artists that address the dilemmas, consequences, and experiences of living in the digital revolution. MIRRORCITY will be at the Hayward Gallery until January 4, 2015.

One of these artists is Emma McNally, whose Choral Fields (1-6) drawings are currently in the MIRRORCITY exhibition.  If you may recall, McNally exhibited her beautiful cosmos-inspired drawing/space body of work at the Drawing Room last year. Reminiscent of drawing/space, McNally's Choral Fields offers a metaphysical, cartographic perspective to contemporary urbanism.

Read on to learn more.

"Emma McNally's drawings suggest maps or charts of things as complex and various as seas, the night sky, military bases, computer circuit boards, data-flow, flight paths.  They also evoke aerial photographs, radar screens and experimental musical scores. Yet though her drawings chime with both the real and the virtual world, they all come from the imagination.  If they were charts, they could map a mindscape.

McNally made Choral Fields 1-6 in a studio by the River Thames at London's West India Dock, a place where water, boats, traffic, planes, telecommunications, banking, and glass-and-steel skyscrapers converge. The drawings echo the pulsing rhythms of the city and reflect the river's ebb and flow. They are created from carbon - basic 'matter' which, like water, is vital for our existence."

Choral Fields 1-6
(200cmx304cm)
graphite on paper

"The title, Choral Fields, suggests both music and a field of activity or vision. It also relates to the philosophical idea of the 'chora', a peripheral space in which forms materialise. 

In these drawings, McNally covers vast expanses of empty space with tracks, traces, ruled lines, hammered dots, smudges, scratches, scribbling - thousands of marks that swarm, buzz, vibrate, hum, clump together and drift apart."

"Her mark-making can be percussive or gestural, violent or quietly lyrical.  She invents new ways of using graphite and carbon, and uses sandpaper as an eraser, sometimes simultaneously applying graphite with one hand and rubbing the markings away with the other."

"She describes how in Choral Field 6 she was trying to make a 'grey area' between form and formlessness: 'it ended up looking like dark water or cloudscape'"

Choral Fields 1-6 was created in a studio space at West India Dock jetty, facilitated by Tim Eastop and the Canal and River Trust.

Related: drawing/space by Emma McNally to show at “Abstract Drawing” exhibition in London’s Drawing Room