Despite the diversity of Melike Kara’s means of expression—primarily painting, but also sculpture, installation, photography, and video—the themes of family, tradition and community remain pivotal in her artistic research, which reads and investigates them relentlessly in a deeply personal way, focusing on roots, identity, and the ideas of home and country. The formal distillation which characterizes her pictorial vocabulary has recently led the artist to explore the motifs of textile patterns, in an intertwining of personal and collective memories, of lived stories and myths. The works utilize tradition to create new narratives, blurring the boundaries between what is, what has been and what could be. In her most recent series of paintings, the artist uses Kurdish tapestries as the starting point for her own compositions. Born to a Kurdish-Alevi family, Kara shows how notions of “home” transcend national borders, how identity becomes hybrid, between home and homeland. The paintings’ elaborate texture is achieved through a stratification of painted layers that emerge in and out of the picture plane. They evoke the intricate weaving of tapestries while eluding representation, resting ambiguously suspended between figuration and abstraction.