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EVENT DESCRIPTION
White Cube is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of new work by Australian-born, New York-based artist Jessica Rankin in Asia. These take as their departure point poetry, particularly that of her mother, Jennifer Rankin (1941–79), and explore landscape as a carrier of emotion and personal memory. Through a combination of embroidered and painted mark-making, Rankin weaves together personal, historical and literary references to create colourful compositions that are at once topographical, cosmological and psychological.
Having previously worked with thread and the diaphanous material of organdy, in 2016 Rankin combined her painting practice with the sewn mark on raw linen canvas. Early in her career, the artist chose to engage the elusive subjects of thought and its expression in language through less ‘heroic’ systems of representation, such as the typically ‘feminine’ medium of embroidery. More aligned, perhaps, with feminist artists of the 1970s whose radical interventions would re-qualify such minor artforms dismissed as ‘craft’, Rankin’s desire for a ‘different way of thinking about making’ likewise challenges the patriarchal lineage embedded in the Western history of painting.
During a time of personal and geopolitical upheaval following the US presidential election in 2016, however, Rankin came to embrace painting as a method of ‘world building, of safe-guarding and maintaining self’. The 26 works included in this exhibition highlight the interplay between the fluidity of paint and the precision of stitch, qualities that now characterise her work. For the artist, this tension helps to complicate the notion of the ‘authentic’ gesture associated with painting traditions, and relates to her interest in cognition and language by conveying the ‘feeling that thoughts can be both insubstantial and weighty’. While some markings repeat endlessly on a loop, in tortured persistence, others flutter in and out; memories are forged and forgotten in equal measure. To this end, Rankin creates constellation-like compositions in which paint and thread connect, respond, reinforce, complete and erase one another.
This exhibition could be understood as an ongoing dialogue between the artist and her mother, a published poet who passed away when Rankin was eight years old. Sky Sound, JR (2024) takes its title from her mother’s poem ‘Earth web’, though it was only upon the Great North American Eclipse in April 2024 that the artist discovered the painting renewed with prophetic meaning. Replete with overlapping circular forms, a dense section of embroidered thread defines a black circle; diffuse brushstrokes radiate outwards from thin rings of paint; and a large, pale-yellow sphere is inflected with strokes of white at the left edge, recalling the diamond ring effect seen in solar eclipses. Looser, sweeping passages of purple, blue and white paint stretch beyond the confines of the canvas, as if tracing the inexorable movement of the natural yet predictable phenomenon. The circular motif reoccurs throughout many of the works in the exhibition, pictured in partial and total phases of completeness.
