Appropriating methods traditionally identified with feminine pursuits – embroidery and needlework – Jessica Rankin’s work features a series of ‘mental maps’, with codes, signs and symbols that explore ideas of memory, intuition and interpretation.
Rankin’s embroidered paintings begin with coloured panels of organdy, a fabric known for its sheer, diaphanous quality. Into this material the artist stitches renderings of mountain terrains, thermodynamic charts and astronomical maps, all of which mutate into lines of text before collapsing back into landscape drawing. The text assumes an abstract quality, executed in capital letters that call to mind the embroidered works of Alighiero Boetti. Taking the form of random thought patterns, these strings of words slip into phrases that avoid narrative structure from one to the other
