Konomi Honda

Konomi Honda (born 1987, Hyogo Prefecture) is a Japanese woodblock printmaker whose practice centres on small-format multicolour water-based woodcuts of overlooked everyday objects, with thematic attention to disappearance — the moment when a familiar lamp, a wrinkled shirt, a piece of paper packaging, or a small flying insect is on the verge of being lost from notice. She trained at Kyoto Seika University, completing the printmaking course in the Department of Media Art and Design in 2010 and continuing as a research student in printmaking through 2011.

From 2012 to 2017 Honda also worked at BOX & NEEDLE, a Kyoto specialty box and paper-products studio, where she handled package and pattern design — work that overlaps directly with the visual register of her printmaking, which is closer in feel to elegant book-craft and stationery design than to the monumental gestural mode of senior Japanese woodcut. Her solo and group exhibitions have been concentrated in Kyoto, particularly through Gallery Morning Kyoto, where she has been a recurring exhibitor across more than a decade. Her solo exhibitions there include 'Standing Point' (2011), 'その場 / On Site' (2013), 'Wrinkled Shirt' (2014), 'loose' (2015), 'SURROUND' (2017), '風 / Wind' (2018-19), and 'おくるもの / Sending Things' (2024). The 2023 showcase work '点灯虫' (Tentou Mushi / Lighting Bug) — a 60.4 x 45.3 cm water-based multicolour woodcut in an edition of 10 — is representative: a small-scale, carefully observed insect motif printed in luminous transparent layers.

Honda's artist-statement framing centres on 'endangered objects' (絶滅危惧種 of the everyday), things that are in the process of disappearing as time flows, and the way landscapes and human emotions created by the existence of such objects persist in memory after the objects themselves are gone. Her woodcuts apply this attention indiscriminately to the natural and the manufactured: a leaf, a piece of wrinkled clothing, a faded lamp.

Beyond her individual woodcut practice, Honda is also active as a member of 'puntas,' a paper-production unit she co-founded with friends after her tenure at BOX & NEEDLE. The unit produces handmade-paper objects and small editions, extending her print sensibility into book and paper-craft. She is represented in galleries primarily through Gallery Morning Kyoto and has been featured at Galerie OVO (Taipei), establishing modest cross-strait circulation for her work.

Honda's exhibition history places her in the cohort of Kyoto Seika printmaking graduates active in the 2010s — a tightly networked group that produces small-format water-based woodcut for a Kansai-area collector base interested in stationery-scale, design-adjacent printmaking. Her recurring exhibitions at Gallery Morning Kyoto since 2011 — five solo shows over thirteen years — distinguish her from peers as a steady career artist with a clearly developed visual identity. Editions are typically small (1/10 is the visible run for 2023's 'Tentou Mushi') and pricing is in the low five-figure yen range, reflecting the small scale and the gallery's positioning toward entry-level collecting.