I am standing before Unnatural Disasters Cont’d, a large fabric work on the wall of Rochelle Rubinstein’s studio. I am immediately captivated and awestruck by its complexity. It contains multiple different sections, and as I am about to find out, each one pertains to a separate layer of rich tapestry within the life of the artist. The middle parts are alive with vibrant colour and an almost psychedelic quality, while the top and bottom contain bleak, dead-looking imagery.

“I started at the bottom, and kept moving up, row by row, from there,” Rubinstein explains.

The dark and heavy bottom, a repetitively block-printed row of sharp lines, is based on an aerial photograph of Auschwitz, taken by a British reconnaissance pilot in 1944, the year Rubinstein’s mother spent in Auschwitz. This is where the loose narrative of Unnatural Disasters begins.

Rubinstein is a Toronto-based, printmaker, painter, fabric and book artist who has exhibited widely. She has also facilitated many workshops and projects with health workers, abused women, people with eating disorders, seniors with depression, at risk youths, and Arab and Jewish artists, using techniques that are intrinsic to her own practice: drawing, carving, printing, painting, sewing, and collage.

The concerns that she shares with these communities are evident in her studio work.

This densely layered work involves an exploration of oppression, repression, environmental and social crisis, personal and institutional power, beauty, desire, death.

If you look around her studio, it becomes apparent rather quickly that stripes are used predominantly throughout her work.

“I often begin a new work by block-printing stripes,” she explains.

The stripes usually become obscured by layers of imagery, carving, and  de-contextualizing, but they remain foundational and essential to the finished work.

“It tool a while before I realized that the stripes may be connected to the uniforms in Auschwitz. That image has been seared into my brain.”

Above the abstracted Auschwitz border that anchors the bottom of Unnatural Disasters Cont’d is a repeating line of black and white block-printed figures.

“That’s my family,” Rubinstein explains, “in a refugee camp in Italy after the war. Light and ‘air’ have entered this section of the work, and I become aware of a subtle increase of breathing space, new rhythms, and sensual  colour, as my eyes move upwards.”

The middle of Unnatural Disasters Cont’d contains colourful, wavy Hebrew letters. “That is the Orphan’s Kaddish (prayer for a dead parent), on repeat,” Rubinstein tells me.

This representation of Kaddish, both mournful and beautiful, leads the eye towards images of hand-built stone walls and wells of Ireland, pottery designs from ancient Ecuador, and Tibetan healing plants and roots (some of them upside-down).

At the very top is a rather startling image: the falling twin towers of 9/11.

This was an event that strongly impacted her life and work, and this repeating image of destruction and loss serves as a kind of bookend to the Auschwitz border at the bottom.

Despite the obvious influences of her Jewish ancestry and cultural upbringing on her work, Rubinstein doesn’t call herself a “Jewish artist,” as her work centres on and addresses humanity as a whole.

She hopes that viewers will not feel limited by knowledge of her background. “Some people look at the striped grids in my work and see the Holocaust,  but others see bamboo fields, or rays of light.”

One piece that she showed me emphasized this beautifully. It included this Hebrew text, in large, block letters: “Bruchim Habaim”.

I asked Rubinstein what that means.

“All who come”, she said, “are welcome.”

To find out more about Rochelle Rubinstein or to view some of her work visit her website, www.rochellerubinstein.com There, you can find more information about her as well as samples of work from the myriad of artistic endeavours over the span of her career.