Australia-born, New York-based artist Jessica Rankin recently opened her first Hong Kong solo exhibition, Sky Sound at White Cube, which was two years in the making. It comprises 26 works of acrylic and embroidery on linen, and of acrylic, graphite, watercolour and thread on paper; coils of floating colour and shapes swirl and shift across the surface of her intimate and monumental works, intersecting with rigid lines of embroidered thread, a signature element of her work.

Rankin builds on the creative innovations of 1970s feminists like Judy Chicago and Margaret Harrison, who upended the traditional hierarchy and distinction between art and craft, bringing “women’s craft” and needlework into the contemporary art space, while at the same time developing her own distinct visual vocabulary. Embracing a fluid approach to media, Rankin uses brushstrokes and embroidery interchangeably, fusing the two with “masculine” fields like cartography, and incorporating geometric forms, astronomical signs and the written word to create an abstracted language. 

The written word, in fact, has come to be as much a defining element in Rankin’s work as her use of embroidery. Throughout her career, she has incorporated words into her work: quotes from books, snatches of overheard conversation, thoughts, poetry and memories take shape and materialise, floating in thread across gossamer, canvas or paper. Although they are not as visually prominent in this exhibition, words are once again foundational to the thematic framework of the show. 

Born in Sydney in 1971 to poet and playwright mother Jennifer Rankin and renowned painter David Rankin, the artist cites her mother’s poetic influence in this exhibition, fusing words with painting, and presenting a dialogue between paint and textile, as well as mother and daughter. Painting and embroidering on raw linen, instead of the diaphanous panels of sheer organdie for which she is best known, she embroiders in thread down the sides of the linen stretchers of many of the paintings. “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,” she says. 

Building on her earlier map-inspired mindscapes, canvases and paper are awash with colour as pigmented waves, splatters, lines and shapes dance across the surface. Pigments bleed from geometric shapes into abstract, amorphous forms, from coolness into warmth, motion into stillness. On the ground floor of White Cube hangs the titular Sky Sound, JR (2024), a large, abstract painting composed of six intertwined circles against a background of unprimed linen.

This work, like many of the other canvases and works on paper featured in this exhibition, combines paint and embroidered passages drawn from poems, including by the artist’s mother – in this case, one titled Earth Web. A large, pale-yellow sphere is speckled with strokes of white at its left edge, radiating embroidered lines of pale blues mirroring the dazzling diamond-ring effect that occurs during solar eclipses. In this cornerstone of the exhibition, the artist delivers a celestial vision, merging the heavenly and earthly, the tangible and intangible. Dusky splashes of violet, indigo and white acrylic pigment unfold like ribbons across the surface, juxtaposed with delicate, rigid lines of blue thread radiating from a densely embroidered, black, cross-hatched orb. On the left side of the stretcher, the words of the title, “sky” and “sound”, are spelled out vertically in thread, the letters stacked on atop one another, and the words spaced out at either end of the frame. The outlines of a large, red circle, painted across the right side of the linen canvas, continue beyond the confines of the canvas and onto the other side of the stretcher. The flat stroke of paint is transformed, as if alchemically, and given dimension with embroidered red thread.

Rankin’s paintings are strongest when she allows for gestures and movement to float in space and breathe, and this is demonstrated best in her larger works. A playful dialogue between lightness and weight, paint and thread can be found across many of the works in this exhibition, as landscapes of constellations and mark-making emerge from spare expanses of raw linen. In With Words, JR (2024), a joyous firecracker of small feathery strokes of pink and watery washes of blue and smoky black pigment explode across the centre of the canvas, intersecting with the rigid, geometric, cross-hatched lines of embroidery, as Rankin tries to capture the language of brushstrokes through thread. 

Hanging nearby, vertical composition Winging at the Edges, JR (2024) elegantly explores the relationship and tension between absence and presence, movement and stillness. Taking its title from the poem Earth-speak, the work visually invokes the poem’s opening line, “One rook winging at the edges of this sky”, bringing her mother’s poetry to life. We can make out what looks like a black bird frozen mid-flight, wings extended and skimming the edges of an embroidered radiating golden sun, like Icarus flying too close to it. Beneath it, a cascade of confetti in fuchsia, gold and black reflects a rush of wind or perhaps the flutter of a flock of birds. Again, the words of the title, “winging at the” and “edges”, are delicately embroidered in thread on either side of the vertical stretcher. 

Rankin has a preoccupation with capturing the unseen or immaterial, and has cited modernist Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and German-American painter Agnes Pelton as inspirations. Both artists were also spiritual seekers, whose works were intended to convey transcendental messages to humanity. Rankin taps into a theosophical artistic visual lineage that strives to reach beyond the visible world. Standing among the paintings in the gallery, the artist strives to pin down the fleetingness, intangibility and fragility of memory and emotion, giving form to the mutability of water and wind, the essence of light, sound, breath, spirit and the disembodied. 

A smaller square format work on linen, Fall Out of the Sun, JR (2024) features a fringe of looped, coloured threads spilling out of the canvas like ectoplasm, spiritual energy exteriorised by physical media, and arcing across the canvas in red, pink and turquoise. The surface is alive with movement and energy. In the painting And the Sky Rushed Down, JR (2024), a rush of wind, suggested by the title, is conveyed in the serpentine blue and white lines that descend from the upper edge of the canvas, crashing into a wave of water, giving rise to a dazzling sea spray, a jet of threaded lines and pointillist daubs of colour. A mediumistic quality is revealed as the artist enters into dialogue with her mother through her poetry, reaching beyond time and space, the earthly and the spirit, the poet’s words guiding skittish shapes and forms over canvas and paper. Merging internal and external worlds, the past and the present, the personal and historical, Sky Sound is an unfolding cartography of consciousness, emotion and the unseen.

^{Published in Artomity magazine, November, 2024}