Conversations: Jessica Rankin and Gemma Rolls-Bentley | White Cube

Why It Matters

Rankin’s approach illustrates how rejecting rigid technique in favor of playful, interdisciplinary dialogue can revitalize contemporary art practice and inspire institutions to support process‑driven work.

Key Takeaways

• Rankin embraces an organic, improvisational creation process daily.
• Lack of formal training fuels freedom to blend painting and embroidery.
• Feminist graduate mentors instilled healthy skepticism shaping her artistic voice.
• Constant dialogue between paint and thread creates visual tension and mystery.
• Playful experimentation prevents rigidity, keeping her work dynamic and engaging.

Summary

In a recent White Cube conversation, artist Jessica Rankin discusses how she navigates a fluid, improvisational workflow that blurs the line between painting and embroidery.

Rankin explains that she never received formal training in either medium, which she credits for the “off‑kilter” freedom that lets her invent on the fly. Influenced by second‑wave feminist professors at Rutgers, she maintains a skeptical distance from her own emotions, allowing paint and thread to argue with each other on the canvas.

She describes the process as a back‑and‑forth dialogue—“I paint something, then I respond in thread, then I respond in paint”—creating palpable tension and mystery that forces viewers to look closely to decipher the layers.

The conversation underscores how embracing uncertainty and cross‑disciplinary play can produce work that feels both intimate and conceptually robust, offering a model for emerging artists and curators seeking to challenge medium hierarchies.

Original Description

To mark the opening of Jessica Rankin’s exhibition ‘in the air / a memory’ at White Cube Mason’s Yard, the artist was joined in conversation with Gemma Rolls-Bentley.

Known for her unique visual grammar, which sees gestural passages of paint brought into tension with embroidered thread, Jessica Rankin presents a new body of work that finds inspiration in the unity of creation and destruction. Across the exhibition, accumulations of paint and stitched lines evoke both cellular and cosmological scales of movement and connect the act of making within cycles of transformation, collapse and renewal.

Gemma Rolls-Bentley has been at the forefront of contemporary art for two decades, working passionately to champion diversity in the field. Her celebrated debut book, 'Queer Art; From Canvas to Club' and 'the Spaces Between' was published in 2024 by Frances Lincoln and is a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Find out more about the exhibition: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/jessica-rankin-masons-yard-2026

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