Plaid 4 by Karen Dubrovsky

I am a printmaker working at the intersection of pattern, memory, and process. My imagery draws from the visual language of historical textiles, particularly vintage needlework and floral motifs from mid-century domestic craft. These sources are not used strictly for nostalgia. They are starting points, familiar structures I can pull apart and rebuild into something new. Much of what I make begins with a recognizable image, a flower, a repeated motif, something with a clear origin. Through layering and shifts in scale the image sits somewhere between representation and abstraction, pieces that echo familiar motifs reimagined in contemporary forms. Seen up close, the work may read as pattern or texture. Viewed from across a room, the original form reassembles itself. I find that threshold interesting, the moment when something resolves or dissolves depending on where you are standing walking the line between pattern and nostalgia. My process is tied to my background in design. I think in frameworks and layers. I am drawn to the logic of how things are built up step by step. Printmaking gives me that structure through planning and sequencing. The work comes from the act of making, from the decisions made in the process that accumulate into something I can not entirely predict. Something in the repetition and the domestic scale of needlework feels important to me, even as I move it further from its original form. To my grandmother and great-grandmother sewing, quilting, and handwork were essential parts of daily life. Their craft forms the foundation of my own. By translating their patterns into new blocks and repeated structures, I build images that act like quilts—structures of memory assembled piece by piece. My work honors the labor of the women who came before me while creating space for new stories to emerge.