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Inside the Exhibition of Jessica Rankin: A Homecoming That Houses Deep Memories
21/03/25
Author: Elizabeth Roberts
DOCUMENTED BY: RIISE
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Australian-born, New York based artist Jessica Rankin is known for her exploration of time and memory through a deeply personal lens. The RIISE team sat down to learn more about her debut solo exhibition Notes from an Earlier Sky, now showing at the Cassandra Bird Gallery in Potts Point, Sydney.
What you see isn’t always what you get: this is true in both art and life. Jessica manages to deceive and delight viewers through her multifaceted works, including a series of embroidered paintings on linen and a collection of hand-embroidered works on paper. Through carefully honed sewing and painting techniques, Jessica knits together words, memory and landscape as part of multilayered narratives in her signature double-sided pieces.
Returning home to Sydney and reconnecting with the place that marks her personal and artistic origins, Jessica is filled with joy. She is travelling with a group of close friends and has found herself reflecting on the impact her parents' work and lives have had on her experience as an artist – her father is the artist David Rankin and her mother is poet and playwright Jennifer Rankin.
Alongside her exhibition at the Cassandra Bird Gallery, Jessica is one of 14 women artists to be featured in The Intelligence of Painting – a showcase of energy that has come to define contemporary painting in Australia – at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Here, Jessica details what it took to bring her latest works to life and how it feels to show in her hometown of Sydney.
“I really wanted to find a way to tangle and confuse the languages – sometimes the paint behaves like thread and sometimes the thread behaves like paint and from a distance it can be quite hard to tell the difference. So there’s a sort of trompe l’oeil effect”.
RIISE: Can you talk us through how you create your works, the emotion in them and how your mother’s work has inspired certain elements.
JR: This exhibition is a series of paintings that I’ve been working on over the last year. They all have embroidered elements in them and they all work with language that comes from my mother’s poetry. The imagery that my mother worked with in her poetry was very embedded in imagery of land and sky – she also had a lot of sonic language. I really felt like those key parts of her poetry informed the way that I made these paintings. They have a celestial feel – they feel like they look into space – they also feel terrestrial in the sense of looking down at a map perhaps. And then there’s also a kind of sonic element to them. They often feel like they’re radiating something – sound or light – that was the generative place that they came from.
RIISE: There’s a fusion between paint and embroidery in your work that makes the viewer want to lean in and see the totality of the image but also understand the method and the artistry of it. How do you create that extraordinary effect?
JR: I’ve always embroidered and I’ve always loved embroidery and for a long time that’s what I did exclusively as an artist. As much as I worked on embroidery, I was really thinking about painting a lot and the legacy of painting but also about my embroidery being in conversation with painting. When I finally started painting on linen and embroidering into the paint, I really wanted to find a way to tangle and confuse the languages – sometimes the paint behaves like thread and sometimes the thread behaves like paint and from a distance it can be quite hard to tell the difference. So there’s a sort of trompe l’oeil effect. But I also really like doing that because I like playing with the hierarchy of material. So if I’m embroidering a mark very slowly and deliberately, does it hold more emotion or more feeling or more truth than when I make a mark very quickly with paint and it sort of comes straight from my inner artistic impulse? Which one holds more meaning and significance? I guess in a way both of them do.
RIISE: You create artworks within artworks in some of your pieces. How did this come about?
JR: I started these works on paper in 2020 during Covid lockdown. I didn’t have access to my studio at the time so I was working on a smaller scale. I would paint and then embroider into the paper and when I finished the first piece, I turned it over to sign it and I realised the embroidered marks created an entirely new drawing on the back. So I wanted to lean into this idea of a double-sided drawing. I responded to the embroidery on the back by watercolouring and writing a line of poetry into it so that in the end they have a recto and a verso.
RIISE: Your debut solo exhibition has just opened at Cassandra Bird Gallery and you’re also part of a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. How does it feel to be experiencing a homecoming of sorts?
JR: It’s incredibly moving and exciting to be here. I was born in Sydney, my mother is from Sydney and I grew up here until I was seven. So to come home and to have this show at Cassandra Bird and to have a piece at the MCA at the same time feels very emotional, very significant. Cassandra Bird Gallery is located in Potts Point, which is where my father had his first exhibition when he was a young artist and where my mother was living where they met and that feels also very significant to me.
Jessica Rankin: Notes from an Earlier Sky is on show at the Cassandra Bird Gallery until 26 April 2025. The Intelligence of Painting is exhibiting at the MCA’s Macgregor Gallery until July 2025.
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Documented By: RIISE
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