HP Editions is pleased to announce its publication of two new prints by artist Jessica Rankin. During her time in the Editions printshop, Rankin created a pair of delicate chine collé etchings that further develop her preoccupation with language, memory, and interpretation. Rankin is best known for transforming sections of sheer organdy into byzantine diagrams of cognition. These embroidered tapestries—which include stream-of-consciousness text, astronomical maps, landscape scenery, and even thermodynamic charts—capture, simultaneously, the sensation of moving through our material world and of deciphering and responding to that world. Together with her Highpoint project, they compose an elegant pictorial diary of lived experience and private reflection. Reverberations features slender black lines and soft, spit bite triangles in blue, gray, yellow, and red. Some of the triangles float independently, while others are grouped in loose geometric configurations. As with Rankin’s tapestries, random phrases crisscross the page; here those phrases were first typewritten and then transferred through photolithography. Parade of Possibilities, Rankin’s second print, contains brown mountains and an ethereal blue sky. These, too, are accented with black contours and dressed in evocative language. “HE KEPT REPEATING IT JUST LIKE IT PUNCTUATED EVERY SENTENCE,” reads one line.
In both works, Rankin’s text resembles Concrete and Surrealist poetry. She treats words as objects and constructs a host of phrases with no discernible narrative; the anecdotes and descriptions instead seem to issue forth automatically, from conscious as well as unconscious thought. Rankin’s translucent imagery is also poised between these realms. What is ultimately remarkable about the prints is their capacity to embody and communicate so many things. Ms. Rankin’s new prints created at Highpoint Editions convey vast and varied expanses of time, interiority, and space.