HONG KONG.- White Cube is presenting 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.

As with many of her poems, in ‘Earth web’ Rankin’s mother considers her relationship to the vast landscapes of Australia: ‘Into this clear space the crows are flying / Their cries circle at the lip-edge / And day passes back over the mountain.’ The long stitches that Rankin embeds into the canvas hint at the trajectory of such movements – of birds or of fading light. The thinned, white acrylic paint – which swirls around the canvas, intermingling with light purples and blues, and is set against definitive circular formations – echoes her mother’s closing lines: ‘Now wind is looping above in that space. / I stand over a distanced earth / Listen for sky sound. And the crows cut in.’

Similarly, Winging at the Edges, JR (2024) takes its title from the poem ‘Earth-speak’. As with ‘sky sound’, ‘Earth-speak’ appears to make reference to alternative, non human forms of communication which, like poetry, live in the interstices of discrete meaning. In this work, an embroidered, radial sun is overlaid with a black smudge of paint, summoning the image in the poem’s opening line: ‘One rook winging at the edges of this sky’. Flecks of golden paint follow their own innate logic across the canvas: flung into the ether or coalescing with rivers of blue, black, red and grey. The composition appears to cascade downwards, invoking waterfalls or ‘the great white cliff’ described in ‘Earth-speak’. This gushing movement – controlled by some unknown order and yet uninhibited and free-flowing – foregrounds the states of abandon, desire, joy and resistance inherent to Rankin’s artistic practice.

Though previously, Rankin often incorporated language directly into organdy’s topography – repeating, overlapping and abstracting word forms – in this body of work, the artist approaches text in a much different way. Following her move to painting, she noted: ‘after years of working on thin fabric, the very body of the stretcher feels like a sculpture to me and so the sides of the painting became as much a part of the painting as the surface.

I found that language could sit there far more comfortably – like the spine of a book’. Running down the sides of many of these cavasses are words that mirror the sensations Rankin manifests in her brushwork. For example, in Our Days Touching, JR (2024) rivers of paint swim from one side of the canvas to the other, though in many areas their shapes waltz around one another, and never quite collide. And yet, running down the right-hand side, neighbouring a pool of pink that encircles strokes of white, is the word ‘TOUCHING’, as though urging the formations to overcome the forces that keep them apart.

Further to her mother’s, Rankin’s exploration of landscape and emotion is also mediated through the words of other poets. To Occur Blueblackly, AN (2024) is one such instance, and refers to the book-length ‘For the Ride’ (2020) by American poet Alice Notley, in which she writes ‘Midnight’s now poised as concept / to occur blueblackly at heart same time as the risin sun.’ Here, whorls of black, inky blue, pink and red paint snake around one another and overlap, eliciting the threat of convergence posed by Notley. Loops of red thread hang off the edge of the canvas, arranged in a semicircle that curves around an egg-yellow lick of paint. Echoes of the paintings and their poets resound in Rankin’s series of works on paper, which rely on similarly vibrant interactions between paint splashes, trails and the carefully sewn line. These works are double-sided and framed so that both sides are visible, subverting the traditional idea of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ of embroidery.

Marrying the gestures of controlled stitch and abstract, painted mark, ‘Sky Sound’ meditates upon the cosmolog-ical and psychological states of order and disorder. Emerging from her continued close reading of poetry, the works translate sensation and experience into line and colour – speaking to the conception of landscape as means of transmitting emotion and memory across death, space, time.

Jessica Rankin was born in 1971 in Sydney, Australia and lives and works in New York. Solo and duo exhibitions include White Cube Paris (2022); White Cube Bermondsey, London (2021); Touchstones Rochdale, UK (2017); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2016); Salon 94, New York (2014); Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta (2013); The Project, New York (2009); MoMA PS1, New York (2006); and Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis (2005). Group exhibitions include Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy (2024); The Uptown Triennial, New York (2017); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2015); Fie Myles, New York (2011); Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco (2011); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2006); The Project, Los Angeles (2005); and Artist’s Space, New York (2003).