PRESENTATION:Jessica Rankin-The Weight of Light
Jessica Rankin’s work maps the porous borderlands between memory, sensation and language — a terrain where stitched marks and spilled pigment read like coordinates of feeling. Her practice, which moves fluently between embroidered organdy panels and luminous canvases, treats surface as a site of translation: thought becomes thread, and thread becomes a kind of notation for interior weather. This hybrid visual language has been a throughline of Rankin’s career, one that she continues to refine in her new exhibition “The Weight of Light”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Carlier | Gebauer Gallery Archive
Rankin’s exhibition “The Weight of Light” presents seven new works that further blur the boundary between painting and textile. The show’s timing and venue place it within a recent string of solo presentations that have consolidated Rankin’s reputation in Europe and New York.
Across these new work, swathes of saturated color — stains, coils and delicate lines — pulse across diaphanous and linen grounds as if the works themselves inhale and exhale. The effect is intimate and cosmic at once: small, handwritten stitches sit beside expanses of pigment that read like nebulae, suggesting that the inner world can be as vast and unknowable as any night sky.
Rankin’s choice of materials is never incidental. She has long favored organdy for its fragility and translucence, a ground that allows embroidery to cast ephemeral shadows and to register time as a physical property of the work. Her canvases, too, are worked with a sensibility that privileges process over polish: paint pools and threads slip, gestures spill past the edges, and surfaces remain porous and unfinished.
Crucially, Rankin did not arrive at these techniques through formal training in either painting or needlework; that lack of academic conditioning has become a creative advantage. She describes her approach as “making in a state of trepidation,” an embrace of uncertainty that lets materials behave unpredictably and invites accidents to become compositional events. The result is a practice that reads as collaborative — artist and material in dialogue.
What makes Rankin’s work compelling is the way it resists tidy categorization. Her embroidered “mental maps” combine words, symbols and abstract forms into a hybrid language where stitch functions like handwriting and pigment behaves like a woven thread. Lines of poetry and fragments of thought — sometimes drawn from writers who have inspired her — are threaded into the fabric of the work, so that reading and seeing become simultaneous acts.
This porousness is also political in a subtle way: by refusing the hierarchy that traditionally separates “fine art” from “craft,” Rankin reimagines needlework as a contemporary, conceptual practice rather than a domestic afterthought. Her work thus participates in a broader revaluation of textile practices within contemporary art while remaining singular in its lyricism and restraint.
Rankin’s visual lexicon is shaped by literary and familial influences. Born in Sydney in 1971 and now based in New York, she has spoken about the role of poetry and voice in her work; her mother, the poet Jennifer Rankin, is often cited as part of that lineage of language and feeling that informs her practice. The artist’s embroideries have incorporated lines and phrases from poets whose cadences resonate with her own visual rhythms.
That interweaving of biography and poetics gives Rankin’s maps their emotional specificity: they are not only abstract meditations but also repositories of memory and speech, where personal and literary histories are stitched into the field of vision.
Rankin’s canvases often feel as if they are mid‑process — gestures spill beyond the frame, threads trail toward the wall, and color pools as if still settling. This sense of becoming is central to the viewer’s experience: the works invite slow looking and repeated returns, rewarding attention with new associations between mark, word and form. The visual grammar she has developed — a syntax of stains, stitches and script — asks us to consider how we navigate our own interior geographies.
In “The Weight of Light”, Jessica Rankin deepens a practice that has always been about translation — of thought into thread, of memory into mark. Her refusal to choose between painting and textile is not a dilettantism but a deliberate strategy: by working in the interstices she opens a space where craft and concept, lyricism and materiality, can coexist. The exhibition is a reminder that the most convincing maps are not those that promise total orientation but those that acknowledge the unknown and invite exploration.
Photo: Jessica Rankin, “Loop up the Sky Swooping” (JR) Jennifer Rankin, 2026, Acrylic and embroidery on linen, 182,9 × 243,8 × 3,8 cm, © Jessica Rankin, Courtesy the artist and Carlier | Gebauer Gallery
Info: Carlier | Gebauer Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 14/3-18/4/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com/
