Biography
Joanne Madeley is a Canadian printmaker and illustrator based in Edmonton, Alberta, who works both in mokuhanga — multi-block, water-based Japanese woodblock printing, hand-printed onto paper — and in screenprinting, within a broader studio print practice. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in printmaking at Concordia University in Montreal. Her studio work appears under the name Studio Arbutus. Madeley developed her screenprinting through residencies in Lendava, Slovenia, and Berkeley, California, and entered the Japanese woodblock tradition through a mokuhanga course in Japan, which has since become a sustained line of her practice.
Her recent prints move between the two techniques: mokuhanga woodblock compositions such as Near Lake Louise — an 8 by 10 inch woodcut built up from six hand-printed colour layers — sit alongside hand-printed screenprints such as Goldfish II and Magpie, each issued in small numbered editions of ten. Across both media she favours layered, transparent colour, with each hue printed over the last to build a soft, painterly effect, and her subject matter is drawn consistently from landscape, animals, and plants. The prints circulate as small editions through her online shop, and she has exhibited across Canada and the United States, though her work has not been the subject of a published monograph or institutional retrospective.
Standard biographical particulars — her birth year, the years of her Concordia training, and the specific Japanese mokuhanga programme she attended — are not part of her widely indexed public record, and a comprehensive exhibition résumé has not been compiled. The current picture, drawn from her own studio site, is of a working mid-career Canadian printmaker whose practice combines mokuhanga woodblock printing with screenprinting, and whose international exposure continues to expand through print-exhibition and residency networks.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇬🇧United Kingdom
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Joanne Madeley is a Canadian printmaker and illustrator based in Edmonton, Alberta, who works both in mokuhanga — multi-block, water-based Japanese woodblock printing, hand-printed onto paper — and in screenprinting, within a broader studio print practice. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in printmaking at Concordia University in Montreal. Her studio work appears under the name Studio Arbutus. Madeley developed her screenprinting through residencies in Lendava, Slovenia, and Berkeley, California, and entered the Japanese woodblock tradition through a mokuhanga course in Japan, which has since become a sustained line of her practice.
Joanne Madeley's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.