White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition by Jessica Rankin. Featuring new, mixed media paintings and works on paper, it marks a significant shift within the artist’s practice.
Known for her large-scale embroideries, collages and watercolours that combine celestial maps and landscapes with text, Rankin’s recent works focus more specifically on the language of painting. While her earlier embroideries could be read within a historical tradition of landscape painting, Rankin’s new paintings can be situated within the trajectory of abstraction.
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Jessica RankinStrange Currents, EA, 2020Ink, acrylic and embroidery on linen182.9 x 243.8 cm | 72 x 96 in.
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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.
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Jessica RankinHigh Thought Tunes, PC, 2020Acrylic, ink and embroidery on linen182.9 x 243.8 cm | 72 x 96 in.
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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.
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Jessica RankinWords to the Moon, THKC, 2020Ink, acrylic and embroidery on linenDiptych, each panel: 152.4 x 152.4 cm | 60 x 60 in.
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"Abrupt falls, a fall. Gravity is pulling us in. Light runs – like mother to child – to embrace this moving surface caught in its sameness. Water and light create that shimmering which takes our breath away."
- Etel Adnan, Extract from ‘Sea and Fog’ (2012), Sea and Fog, Nightboat Books, 2012
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Jessica RankinTo Light and Then Return, ED, 2020Ink, acrylic and embroidery on linen152.4 x 152.4 cm | 60 x 60 in.
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“You can see that this thread line echoes this paint line or vice versa. It’s sometimes hard to tell but they both hold quickness and slowness and they both hold this possibility of the hero mark, the grand gesture, of being emotive or holding an intellectual rigour through mark making.”
- Jessica Rankin
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Jessica RankinI Pull the Shadows Around Me, FO'H, 2020Ink, acrylic and embroidery on linen121.9 x 121.9 cm | 48 x 48 in.
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Jessica RankinI Am Not Quite You But Almost, FO'H, 2020Ink, acrylic and embroidery on linenDiptych, each panel: 121.9 x 121.9 cm | 48 x 48 in.
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Jessica RankinBehind Thought, HC, 2020Ink, acrylic and embroidery on linen76.2 x 76.2 cm | 30 x 30 in.Find out more
"There was a moment where as I worked on these small pieces, because they were quite small originally, they felt quite sculptural in my hands. I’d be holding them, sewing on them, then painting on them, and then picking them back up and I started to really look at the sides of each piece and think about how they feel very object-like to me... That was when I started playing with the point where the paint reaches the edge of the painting surface. I bought thread up to meet that so that sometimes you can’t tell where the paint stops and the thread begins so it feels it is spilling over the side as paint but it has become thread. Then into that thread, I put the language - the written language - and so they feel somewhat like the spine of a book. Once you see that and then you realise that the sides of the paintings have the language and all of this careful threadwork then they become even sometimes like the focus of what you are looking at."
- Jessica Rankin
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A new series of works on paper, completed in the seclusion of rural upstate New York during the 2020 lockdown, combine colourful, exuberant watercolour with delicate areas of stitching. Using a palette evocative of warm summer days and lush, fresh foliage, they radiate energy; they speak of new beginnings and joyful artistic freedom. In some, circular marks from the bottom of a jar are incorporated into the compositions. which are themselves built up from washes, drips, splashes and stains. Nestled between shapes and colours are phrases, words and letters – some indecipherable, others clear – often dissolving into another form of language – that of tiny, colourful stitching.
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Jessica RankinThe Hydrant Sprung of Green, 2020Acrylic, ink, graphite, watercolour and embroidery thread on paperDouble-sided artwork: 45.7 x 61 cm | 18 x 24 in.
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Jessica RankinIn the ebb and tide of echo , 2020Acrylic, ink, graphite, watercolour and embroidery thread on paperDouble-sided artwork: 45.7 x 61 cm | 18 x 24 in.Find out more
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Jessica RankinOnce They Were You , 2020Acrylic, ink, graphite, watercolour and embroidery thread on paperDouble-sided artwork: 45.7 x 61 cm | 18 x 24 in.Find out more
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Jessica RankinCatskills Summer 2020 #3 , 2020Acrylic, ink, graphite and embroidery paper on a postcardDouble-sided artwork: 10.2 x 15.2 cm | 4 x 6 in.Find out more
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Jessica RankinCatskills Summer 2020 #31 , 2020Acrylic, ink, graphite and embroidery paper on a postcardDouble-sided artwork: 10.2 x 15.2 cm | 4 x 6 in.Find out more
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Jessica RankinCatskills Summer 2020 #33 , 2020Acrylic, ink, graphite and embroidery paper on a postcardDouble-sided artwork: 10.2 x 15.2 cm | 4 x 6 in.Find out more
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To enquire about any of the works included in our presentation
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Jessica Rankin
Artist Page