Excerpt from exhibition publication:

Amy Berk inherited several trunks with neatly ironed and folded table linens that belonged to her grandmother, a successful Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. Berk’s family lore holds sacred the decades of the 1950s and 60s, when the grandmother’s table was a festive gathering place for the family and its many guests. In Recoverings, Berk rearranged, hand-sewed, and stretched a number of tablecloths and napkins to create subtle “canvases,” whose shimmer, texture, and newly formed patterns transform the simple textiles, usually background for a table service, into subjects of aesthetic refl ection. Starting as utilitarian, horizontally oriented objects, they have now assumed an upright, vertical position on the museum wall. The real effect of the “canvases” lies in the persistence of the stain. The stain links two worlds inhabited by Amy Berk. First is the world of her tribe, the domestic world seen through the lens of nostalgia and desire, realized as a chance food stain at a family table. Second is the world of art where the stain, representing the touch of an artist’s hand, is imbued with immense significance. Straddling the two worlds, Berk attempts to reconcile them; she is recovering the memory of her grandmother by elevating her to the status of an artist, by making the food stain represent the absent woman’s touch on her granddaughter’s life. This veneration of the stain is reminiscent of a ceremonial cloth, called the Torah binder, specific to Western Ashkenazim in the 17th-19th centuries.

https://magnes.berkeley.edu/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/revisions-amy-berk-recoverings/.

look at this?