Kate Desforges

Kate Desforges (Kathryn Desforges) is a Devon-born, Yorkshire-based British printmaker and educator whose practice ranges across mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock), mokulito (wood lithography), etching with sugarlift and aquatint, photo-etching, photo-lithography, and woodcut. She is the Print Technician at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop (WYPW) in Mirfield, an open-access print studio in Northern England, and runs Kathryn Desforges Studio under her own imprint.

Desforges trained as a printmaker in the United Kingdom and consolidated her engagement with mokuhanga during a five-week residency in Japan in 2018, an immersive period of daily carving and printing that reframed her practice. Already focused on the relationship between mark, surface, and material, she turned toward the slower, hand-burnished, water-based register of Japanese woodblock printing, and toward an associated abstract idiom rather than the figurative imagery typical of European mokuhanga adopters.

Her studio output includes the ongoing Fragments series, small-format minimal abstract works on plywood substrate that use repetitive carving as a form of drawing -- black brushstrokes, dashes, and curved organic forms set against a textured wood ground. The series is presented both as editioned prints and as unique mixed-media works on plywood that combine pencil, charcoal, watercolour, acrylic, pastel, and printed elements. Earlier and parallel works include the mixed-media print 'Support Structures' (2020) and the earlier woodcut series 'Landforms' (2017); much of her recent work extends the same vocabulary of abstract, water-based woodblock and mixed-media assemblage on Japanese washi and found plywood.

Desforges's parallel teaching practice is broad: she runs short courses on mokuhanga and related techniques at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop and at Handprinted, among other venues, alongside one-to-one tuition in mokulito, mokuhanga, and etching. She is profiled by Handprinted's 'Meet the Maker' series, teaches within West Yorkshire Print Workshop's mokuhanga programming, and ran a Crowdfunder campaign that originally funded her 2018 Japan residency.

Within the small but growing British mokuhanga community she is one of the most active educators, and her studio practice represents a clear example of how a Japan-trained mokuhanga printmaker has, on returning to the UK, redirected the medium away from its traditional figurative register and toward minimalist abstract material exploration. The practice sits in dialogue with the wider contemporary printmaking community of Northern England.