This profile is part of our Featured Artist Pop-Up Series, where artists host an expanded makers’ market at HYPHAE at 50 Arrow Gallery. In this profile, learn more about June 2026 Featured Artist Pascale Jarvis, owner of raskl. Find them online and on Instagram.
Describe what you create and what inspires you.
I’m a printmaker, specializing in linocut block prints on fabric. I create carvings, which then become stamps – blocks – that create patterns on textiles, ultimately creating garments that feature images inspired by the flora and fauna of Mt. Tom and its surrounding hillside. Iteration, using the same image over and over again with little tweaks to shift the final product, has always been a primary mode of mine.
Inspiration finds me when I’m outside, held by the breeze and tickled by overhanging leaves. The work I make lives as an ode to our specific ecosystem here in Western Mass – and I like to think that by wearing it, we hold onto the memories of our ecosystem just as it holds onto the many versions of ourselves who are part of it.
Where do you trace your creative roots back to?
My grandmothers were/are particularly creative women, as were their mothers and their mothers’ mothers for generations, I’m sure. Working with textiles ties me to an intergenerational creative practice, one that’s particularly matrilineal – which has been more juicy for me to delve into now that I’ve transitioned away from those, in my case, particularly gendered expectations. Circling back to a more recent timeline, though: I’ve been creating since my hands were coordinated enough to hold a pencil, although words were always my primary focus until printmaking found me.
What do you find challenging about the creative process?
Oh lord – so much of it can be challenging! Perhaps ironically here, visual creative expression has never been my primary way of communicating thought. I’ve learned to consider my printmaking practice to be expressive in the way it allows me to channel my love of handwritten spreadsheets and an organized to do list into an inventory of garments, carefully spanning a range of designs in as many sizes as I can thrift. Generating big, creative ideas, thinking beyond the pragmatic, these are challenges that require collaborating with other people. And literally drawing, too – where my printmaking practice begins, as each design is drawn onto linoleum before I carve it out – is a mode that makes my attention span quiver. It’s a real challenge to get myself to sit down to do it most days, especially since carving feels so different.
What goals do you have for your creative pursuits?
I’m in an interesting spot of deciding whether to scale up raskl. or to keep on trucking with what I’ve been doing for years now. Sometimes I dream of opening a combination storefront-studio for specifically upcycled textiles, a place where folks can come watch as various printmakers and sewists alchemize materials into new pieces while perusing our wares. But then I think of how much time and effort an endeavor like that would require, how that would take me away from a lot of the things I love. My current goal is to figure out a better work-life balance that lets me get outside the studio more often, and also to carve more images. Maybe to refurbish an ice cream trunk into a traveling raskl. showroom. Or maybe instead just to spend more time with my garden, in that good dirt.
Any exciting things you want to share?
Just my gratitude, really! raskl. allows me to engage with something that, to me, feels pretty spiritual – a relational way of artmaking in conversation with my friends the trees, my friend Mt. Tom, my friends the garlic and toads, my friends all of y’all who I get to chat with during art markets. Living the rest of my life this way would be the greatest gift.
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