Biography
Julie Murphy is a contemporary printmaker based in the United Kingdom whose studio practice is centred on mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock printing method, and who has been a participating artist in the international juried exhibitions of the International Mokuhanga Conference. Birth and death dates have not been published, and the available record places her in the post-2010 generation of British mokuhanga practitioners whose primary documentation is the artist's own studio website (juliemurphyprintmaker.co.uk) and the IMC exhibition lists. She describes her technique in standard contemporary revival terms: carving the imagery into multiple sheets of wooden plywood (typically shina or birch) by hand using Japanese knives and chisels, applying water-based watercolour pigments to each block with brushes, and hand-printing onto fine Japanese paper (washi) by means of a bamboo baren, in a fully non-toxic, hand-pulled process built up across multiple impressions to layer colour and create gradated effects. Her gallery section, organized as 2019-present, documents a consistent landscape and natural-world subject matter — coastal views, woodland interiors, and atmospheric land-and-sky studies — built in the multi-block colour register characteristic of the contemporary revival. She has been a participating artist in the IMC2024 Echizen juried international exhibition, which constitutes her highest-profile presentation in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit and places her in the cohort of British and Irish mokuhanga makers whose careers have been built principally through the IMC platform rather than through the older British wood-engravers' Society or the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Beyond the IMC, she is documented through workshops and small exhibitions in the regional UK print scene, and she maintains an active social-media studio practice on Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter), where she has been a participant in the broader online mokuhanga community that has grown around David Bull's Mokuhankan platform, April Vollmer's Manhattan-based teaching programme, and the Mokuhanga Sisters collective. Public-collection holdings have not been documented, and her place in the contemporary record is best characterized as that of a mid-career British mokuhanga maker whose recognition has been principally through the IMC juried-exhibition route. The current thin bio in commercial print databases reflects the artist's deliberately understated public profile and the genuinely limited scholarly literature on the post-2018 British mokuhanga cohort, rather than a research gap that further investigation will substantially fill at this stage of her career; a more developed art-historical appraisal would depend on the continuing development of her exhibition record and on whether she enters the museum-collection circuit in the next decade.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇮🇪Ireland
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 5
Frequently Asked Questions
Julie Murphy is a contemporary printmaker based in the United Kingdom whose studio practice is centred on mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock printing method, and who has been a participating artist in the international juried exhibitions of the International Mokuhanga Conference. Birth and death dates have not been published, and the available record places her in the post-2010 generation of British mokuhanga practitioners whose primary documentation is the artist's own studio website (juliemurphyprintmaker.co.uk) and the IMC exhibition lists. She describes her technique in standard contemporary revival terms: carving the imagery into multiple sheets of wooden plywood (typically shina or birch) by hand using Japanese knives and chisels, applying water-based watercolour pigments to each block with brushes, and hand-printing onto fine Japanese paper (washi) by means of a bamboo baren, in a fully non-toxic, hand-pulled process built up across multiple impressions to layer colour and create gradated effects. Her gallery section, organized as 2019-present, documents a consistent landscape and natural-world subject matter — coastal views, woodland interiors, and atmospheric land-and-sky studies — built in the multi-block colour register characteristic of the contemporary revival. She has been a participating artist in the IMC2024 Echizen juried international exhibition, which constitutes her highest-profile presentation in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit and places her in the cohort of British and Irish mokuhanga makers whose careers have been built principally through the IMC platform rather than through the older British wood-engravers' Society or the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Beyond the IMC, she is documented through workshops and small exhibitions in the regional UK print scene, and she maintains an active social-media studio practice on Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter), where she has been a participant in the broader online mokuhanga community that has grown around David Bull's Mokuhankan platform, April Vollmer's Manhattan-based teaching programme, and the Mokuhanga Sisters collective. Public-collection holdings have not been documented, and her place in the contemporary record is best characterized as that of a mid-career British mokuhanga maker whose recognition has been principally through the IMC juried-exhibition route. The current thin bio in commercial print databases reflects the artist's deliberately understated public profile and the genuinely limited scholarly literature on the post-2018 British mokuhanga cohort, rather than a research gap that further investigation will substantially fill at this stage of her career; a more developed art-historical appraisal would depend on the continuing development of her exhibition record and on whether she enters the museum-collection circuit in the next decade.
Julie Murphy'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.
Julie Murphy is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.
