‘Mum wasn’t prepared to die … I went to her work to look for her’

Artist Jessica Rankin lost her mother, the acclaimed poet Jennifer Rankin, when she was only eight – it’s an event that informs her artwork even today.

Jessica Rankin. Picture: On White Wall

You’ve exhibited around the world – including in New York, Venice and Hong Kong – but your father, the painter David Rankin, once tried to forbid you from studying art at all. Why? I think he was nervous; he came from a very working class background and understood how tenuous life as an artist was. His desire was for me to have a career, and then also be an artist. He really wanted me to be a lawyer, which was never going to happen.

It feels like your late mother, the poet and playwright Jennifer Rankin, is ever-present in your work. She died when you were just eight years old. How did you cope? My mum wasn’t someone who was prepared to die. I mean, nobody wants to die, but she was in absolute denial of it. So there was no sense of, “Here is a legacy for my children, so that they can have something of me as they get older, because I’m not going to be here.” There was no letter. And that was something I desperately wanted. She got sick when I was six and so for most of my childhood I always felt like she was elusive and out of reach. I definitely went to her work to look for her. At first for almost self-involved reasons – I was trying to find something of myself in there so I could understand … ‘How did she love me? Did I have a mother?’

Jessica Rankin at work. Picture: On White Wall

When opening her show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, your ex wife, the celebrated painter Julie Mehretu, mentioned your mother’s influence on her work too, and revealed they shared a birthday! Their shared birthday really made it feel like the universe had just luckily thrown Julie and me together. We met in a bar. We had no community or context in common. And then we discovered we were both artists, we had both been waiting tables to support ourselves, we were both from other places but made our lives in the United States. [Rankin was born and raised in Melbourne and moved to New York after university]. We both had a life-changing event at around the same age – her family fled Ethiopia, and my mother died. And we both centred our lives around family and art.

What is your relationship like today? I am so grateful, even though the marriage is over, that we still have this incredible life together. We raise our children together and we’ve been able to get over whatever happens that ends a marriage and put that in its own place, and hold on to the best parts of what we had. That has been an incredible gift.

Working with fabrics. Picture: On White Wall

Tell us about the works in Notes From an Earlier Sky, your debut solo exhibition in Sydney. In the past few years I’ve transitioned from making primarily embroidered works that speak about painting to making actual paintings. I still work with language – I’ve taken phrases from poetry, including my mother’s work, and embroidered that on the sides of the paintings. There’s a resonance back and forth between the image that sits on the front and the language that sits on the sides.

Why did you resist painting for so long? Growing up, the only artist that I’d spent time around was Dad. He was my main caretaker and I was like a sponge. I absorbed his language and his mark-making so deeply that every time I would paint, I felt like I was making work that looked like his!

Does it still happen that sometimes your work will resemble his? All the time! I still think he is my primary influence in many ways. I would love to do a two-person show with him, because our languages are so shared. He jokes that these days he’s more influenced by me than I am by him. And my children are making art now too. I remember when my oldest child was first in Dad’s studio, when she was really little with me and Julie … Dad handed her a paintbrush and said, “Welcome to the family business!”

Notes From an Earlier Sky opens on March 19 at Cassandra Bird Gallery in Sydney