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Sydney-born Jessica Rankin uses embroidery to draw on large swathes of organdy, marking up diaphanous surfaces that read, loosely, as fragments of maps and journals. Rankin's 'drawing' - the term is hers - also includes text; sentence fragments run together and worked as a continuous line or block. The subject of a 2007 solo show at White Cube in London's Hoxton Square, Rankin's combination of embellishment and écriture conjures up memory's territory, sketching out the terrain of mental interiority.

Titles such as Hinterland, 2007, Everything is still there, 2005, Inner moments of complete blankness, 2003, and Once forgotten now, 2001, hint at the layout of Rankin's stitched-up 'brainscapes'. Looping sewn lines read like cartographic contours; a scattering of nubbly dots evoke the constellations but Rankin's work is less concerned with the re-creation of particular map-making procedures - territorial, astronomical - than with making sense of marked figures in space and features on land. Her text fragments, scattered and linked across the fabric surface, pose the same kind of questions about the relationship of place and meaning: how are thoughts and memories staked, recorded or otherwise put into place.  In the scrim of interiority charted by her brainscapes, there is no fixity despite the measured pull of stitches across the surface. Stellar points linked by thread, lines of text and geophysical contours meld. The organdy panels, hung just out from the wall, fall free, subject to gravity and micro movements of gallery air, giving her work a potential breathiness a painter might envy. Rankin's stitches cast shadows.

  Her choice of medium arose, at least in part, from the need to claim a means and artistic identity of her own: her father is the painter David Rankin. Based, like him, in New York, Rankin studied at the city's Studio School and at the University of Melbourne before graduating from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in 1997. She explains her choice this way:

I really wanted to paint and did for several years. I just found it hard to find my own language in paint outside of my father's. When I returned from New York to finish my history degree I put art on the back burner ... but all the while I was making little constructions out of different things. I was drawing, building and also sewing. I learned how to embroider as a girl from a babysitter and I incorporated that more and more. Gradually the combination of drawing and embroidery came to dominate the work.
 
 

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2008 issue.