PREVIEW: Jessica Rankin-Dreamwork of Trees

Jessica Rankin creates expansive maps of landscapes dotted with codes, signs, and symbols that refer to the processes of memory, intuition, and interpretation. Mountain ranges, constellations, thermodynamic readings, lines of stream-of-consciousness text, and neurological signals morph, merge, and stretch across her embroideries and works on paper. Expansive and intuitive, Rankin’s works are also often marked by swathes of vibrant color that appear as stains, splotches, or coiling lines.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: carlier|gebauer Gallery Archive

While Jessica Rankin’s earlier paintings were more closely linked to processes of chance and improvisation, which the artist described as a kind of “free fall,” Rankin’s most recent work, that is on show in her solo exhibition “Dreamwork of Trees”, has a more intentional, grounded approach that is explicitly in conversation with  the history of painting. Just as individual words gleaned through close, embodied reading enter into her paintings, so too do brushstrokes, pigments, or shapes inspired by her study of works by other artists. This dialogical approach to making evinces a radical sense  of openness, not merely to the influences of other thinkers and makers, but also to the synergetic possibilities of bringing together different forms of visual media. Rankin’s combination of vivid stains of color with energetic brushwork, impasto, and embroidery floss upend traditional hierarchies of visual art and handicraft in favor of a much more fluid, dynamic approach that, in the artist’s words, “tries to think about mark-making inhabiting the realm of language and the realm of language inhabiting the mark making—and the ways in which they speak to each other and become each other”. Jessica Rankin was born in 1971 in Sydney, Australia, For the first part of her career, Rankin produced textile works which were marked by a delicate, spectral quality, employing diaphanous organdie as their ground and hung from pins in front of the wall. Casting a series of transient shadows, their very material structure suggests the temporal and their lyrical combination of word and image serves to highlight the artist’s ongoing project: a hybrid weaving of personal, fictional and historical voices. Mappings, constellation-type imagery and lines of text form thematic paths across the material surface; temporal webs which elide words and images from lived experience. While purely abstract, their compositions suggest simultaneous spatial perspectives, as if we could be looking up at a night sky, down at the lights of a city or far across an expansive landscape. Through deft sewn mark-making, Rankin exploits the personal with the geopolitical, the subjective with the objective, and a mental with a scientific understanding of mapping. In 2016, Rankin turned exclusively to painting, combining gestural abstraction with the sewn mark on raw canvas. While her embroideries can be read within a history of landscape painting, Rankin’s paintings can be situated within the ongoing trajectory of painterly abstraction. Expressive and emotive, they offer a visual encounter that is both fast and slow, contrasting areas of rest for the eye with spontaneous, intuitive mark making. The controlled interplay of dual mediums across the pictorial space creates a tension, in which paint and thread connect, respond and erase each other. Fusing symmetry with asymmetry and forms that double and reduce with organic free-flowing parts, they deal with the ‘ends and beginnings of life and matter’, foregrounding themes of desire, joy, intimacy and tenderness, suggesting how these states can forge a space for resistance. Taking their inspiration from the literature of marginalised voices: of women writers, gay writers or writers of color, and adopting John Cage’s adage to ‘be unfamiliar to yourself’, they embrace intuition, flux, error in as much as they are structured around harmonious abstraction. Pushing her abstract language to the limit by choosing gestures, colors and ways of making that are hard to control or distinctly uncomfortable, Rankin embraces the possibility for their formal collapse. Making the thread behave like paint and, at times, the paint behave like thread sets up a material engagement, a back and forth where the eye moves all around the pictorial forms and where different passages echo and mimic each other. While the organdie works referenced the celestial, Rankin attempts to capture this same ‘deep space’ within her paintings. In her watercolors, which are saturated with exuberant colour, Rankin contrasts abstract, flowing images with precise areas of stitching. Evocative of bright sunlight and fresh foliage, they emit a radiant energy, a sense of emergence and a joyful artistic freedom. In some, circular marks from the bottom of the water jar are incorporated into the compositions which are built up from washes, drips, splashes and stains, while in others, handwritten, pencilled words and fragments of poetry are arranged in rotational formation across the paper.

Photo: Jessica Rankin,There was one summer returning over and over, 2021, Recto: acrylic and embroidery, Verso: watercolor, graphite and embroidery,45,7 x 61 cm, © Jessica Rankin,Courtesy the artist and carlier|gebauer Gallery

Info: carlier|gebauer Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 11/3-15/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com/