Karen Margolis (b. United States) is a New York-based artist whose process-intensive works employ repetitive mark-making, cutting, and material manipulation to construct visual maps of consciousness and psychological experience. Working primarily with obsolete cartographic materials, handmade paper, and paint, Margolis creates intricate, labor-driven compositions built from thousands of hand-cut circles that function not as representations of physical geography but as cartographies of interior states—visualizing the unseen operations of thought, emotion, and neural activity. Margolis's practice is informed by her background in neuropsychology. Trained initially in psychology before turning to art, she draws on her understanding of cognitive processes and mental structures to create works that investigate how consciousness operates beneath conscious awareness. Her use of the circle as a fundamental formal unit references the Buddhist enso—a symbol of infinity, perfection, and, paradoxically, imperfection—while simultaneously evoking neurons, synapses, and the brain's networked structures. Each circle is individually burned, cut, or painted, accumulating into dense fields that generate optical movement and suggest both order and disorder, pattern and chaos. Her methodology is rooted in accumulation and destruction. Margolis sources obsolete maps—documents of geographic knowledge rendered useless by time and technological change—and subjects them to processes inspired by trephination, the ancient surgical practice of boring holes in the skull to treat ailments. Through burning and cutting, she transforms these defunct systems of orientation into new configurations that map psychological rather than physical terrain. The resulting works operate through contradiction: they are meticulously constructed yet visually chaotic, highly controlled yet visually unstable, micro in scale yet cosmic in suggestion. The work functions as both record and meditation. Margolis's obsessive, repetitive process—cutting thousands of circles by hand—becomes a form of sustained attention, the act of making inseparable from the conceptual investigation. Her compositions balance on the edge of perceptual overload, their frenetic surfaces creating visual movement that mirrors the ceaseless activity of mental processes. The work invites sustained observation while resisting easy resolution, operating in a state of productive tension between coherence and dissolution. Margolis has created significant public commissions, including a permanent installation for Amtrak's Metropolitan Lounge at Moynihan Train Hall, New York (2023), and mosaic panels for the 86th Street subway station, Brooklyn, through MTA Arts & Design (2018). She has completed commissions for science buildings in Boston and New York, integrating her visual language into institutional contexts where questions of knowledge, perception, and neural function resonate with her practice. Her work has been exhibited at Foley Gallery, New York; Garis & Hahn, New York; 490 Atlantic Gallery, Brooklyn; and traveled nationally in the exhibition Cut up/Cut out (2016–2021). She has presented work at the Paper Biennial, Rijswijk Museum, Netherlands; Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, New Jersey; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, among others. Margolis received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1998) and a workspace residency at Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. She holds a BS in Psychology from Colorado State University and studied art at Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the Art Students League of New York. Margolis lives and works in New York.