How Indian Roots Shape Eknoor Matharoo’s Woodblock Print Practice

At just 23, Eknoor Matharoo has already built a print practice grounded in patience, material curiosity, and a deep connection to place. A recent graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Matharoo now works full time from her own studio in Chandigarh, India, where she continues to explore how printmaking can hold memory, movement, and lived experience.

Matharoo’s relationship with printmaking began during her studies in Vancouver, where a foundational course in relief printing became a turning point. Encouraged by her professors, she committed fully to the medium, eventually returning to the same classroom as an undergraduate teaching assistant in her final semester. The experience marked a full-circle moment and reinforced her desire to keep printmaking alive while pushing its boundaries through unconventional material use.

Her most recent body of work, completed in July 2025, is a woodblock monoprint series made using a single piece of wood. Across twelve prints, the same block was inked more than 150 times, requiring sustained technical control and extreme patience. Rather than carving multiple blocks, Matharoo chose to work repeatedly with one surface, allowing the wood to evolve through wear, pressure, and ink. Each print emerged as a distinct image, demonstrating how a single material can tell many stories over time.

The imagery in the series centres on quiet, rectangular forms that resemble windows. These shapes hold light, distance, and memory, acting as metaphors for homes remembered, imagined, or left behind. The grain of the wood becomes an active participant in the narrative, carrying marks that suggest travel, time, and repetition. The prints reflect the experience of living between places, where ideas of home become layered and fragmented rather than fixed.

Created shortly before Matharoo relocated from Canada back to India, the series holds particular emotional weight. It stands as her final major body of work produced in Vancouver, shaped by the tension of departure and return. Now based in Chandigarh, she continues to develop her practice from her private studio, Atelier GEIST, working across printmaking, illustration, and bookmaking.

For Matharoo, process is inseparable from meaning. As she notes, “Printmaking keeps me honest. It reveals where I rush, where I resist, and where I finally let the image become itself.” That philosophy is evident throughout the woodblock series, where restraint, repetition, and attention allow the material to guide the outcome.

Rooted in Indian heritage and shaped by transnational experience, Matharoo’s work positions printmaking as both a personal and cultural act. Through wood, ink, and time, her practice reflects a commitment to material-led storytelling and to keeping the medium relevant through care, experimentation, and lived experience.

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