JESSICA RANKIN: SKY SOUND

White Cube is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of new work by Jessica Rankin in Asia, “Sky Sound”.

September 20 – November 9, 2024

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.

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.

Marrying the gestures of controlled stitch and abstract, painted mark, ‘Sky Sound’ meditates upon the cosmological 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.