Jessica Rankin @ White Cube Bermondsey

The Nostalgia for the Infinite, is an exhibition by Jessica Rankin. Featuring new, mixed media paintings and works on paper, marks a significant shift within the artist’s practice.

Known for her large-scale embroideries, collages and watercolours that combine celestial maps and landscapes with text, Rankin’s recent works focus more specifically on the language of painting. While her earlier embroideries could be read within a historical tradition of landscape painting, Rankin’s new paintings can be situated within the trajectory of abstraction.

Rankin draws on a wide range of subjects and themes, including personal experience, memory, poetry and literature. Responding to John Cage’s adage of being ‘unfamiliar to yourself’, this new body of work emerges from what Rankin has described as ‘a place of free-fall’. ‘I wanted to not know what I was’.