Dora Kurshumova transforms traditional embroidery into paintings and opens a window to a beautiful past

An exhibition of 32 paintings, created using various techniques but united by a single theme – Bulgarian embroidery – is presented at the Regional Ethnographic Museum – Plovdiv by the master artist from Sliven, Dora Kurshumova. The solo exhibition of this guardian of colors, words, and roots will be opened in the museum’s Grand Hall on February 26.

Dora Kurshumova creates her “Embroidered World” not with threads, but with acrylic and oil paints, fragments of authentic embroidery, and structural paste. As she herself shares, she also uses a great deal of imagination. Her project both engages and provokes reflection on the role and significance of embroidery, as well as on the messages and protective symbols encoded within it.

“The most interesting for me were the ‘zashivi’ – samples of different motifs, through which I tried to tell stories about holidays and everyday life. Maidens, roosters, and peacocks are my main characters – images created more than a century ago with cross-stitch in various villages of the Sliven region,” the artist explains. She adds that this used to be the “secret” distinguishing mark – a kind of “writing system” for each village. From it, one could tell where a person came from and to which family they belonged. The embroidery revealed whether the woman before you was a maiden or a bride, and whether a bachelor was ready for marriage.

In her юбилейна 80-а exhibition, Kurshumova presents her artworks as a way for traditional embroidery to find its place in the contemporary Bulgarian home. She shares that she greatly enjoyed creating her landscapes, in which tree crowns, lakes, and meadows are composed of rows of embroidered motifs. Particularly impressive are the combinations of embroidered birds perched on embroidered branches, as well as the small collages that seem to turn into a window to a beautiful past that must not be forgotten.

Many call Dora Kurshumova a modern-day enlightener because of her dozens of initiatives dedicated to preserving, passing on, and promoting Bulgarian roots and traditions. She is a person of at least seven professions, including economist, artist, writer, and local historian, among others. Although she manages a large accounting firm with 24 employees, she finds the time and energy to support public causes, organize events, plein-airs, and exhibitions, and, of course, work with children.

At the heart of her creative work lies a special place for the great Bulgarian carpet-weaving school. It is no coincidence that she was among the driving forces behind the large-scale open-air presentation of Kotel carpets, which gained wide international attention and was held last summer in Medven. Dora Kurshumova is the recipient of the “Guardian of Traditions” award, along with many other distinctions and honors.