Intuitive in her approach, Rankin draws on a wide range of subjects and themes, including personal experience, memory, poetry and literature. Responding to John Cage’s adage of being ‘unfamiliar to yourself’, this new body of work emerges from what Rankin has described as ‘a place of free-fall’. ‘I wanted to not know what I was doing’ she has said, at the same time as ‘trying to keep myself off balance in the process of making.’ She fuses symmetry with asymmetry, creating forms that seem to both double and reduce through free-flowing gestures. With their pools of vivid colour that appear to organically spread across the canvas, the works recall the ‘abstract climates’ of Helen Frankenthaler. But Rankin’s work uses thread as well as paint, thereby opening up the possibilities not only for a link to modernist abstract painting but also the slow, methodological approach of handcraft.

From a distance, paint splashes are indistinguishable from stitches, while close-up, dense areas of stitching contrast with thinly painted stains of colour. This shift between mediums and density evokes a sense of physical energy and movement. Deep blues, rich pinks and bright yellows and oranges are offset by the neutral colour of the raw canvas surface, and rapid, gestural mark-making connects with slow, controlled areas of stitching, combining to create an unexpected rhythm to the overall compositions. In some works, the sides of the canvases are heavily worked with more thread and fragments of text. Inspired by a multitude of voices, including those of Etel Adnan, Emily Dickinson, Cecil Taylor, Paul Celan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Hélène Cisoux and Clarice Lispector, they behave like spines on a book, revealing emotional and alluring quotes or statements.