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 a Print Technician at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop (WYPW) in Mirfield, the leading 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 during which, by her own account, she carved and printed in a single room for eight hours a day. The Japan residency reframed her practice — already focused on the relationship between mark, surface, and material — 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 current studio output, the ongoing Fragments series (2025–), consists of 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 at her shop both as editioned prints (Fragments Print 1, Print 2, Print 3) and as unique mixed-media works on plywood (Fragments 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, etc.) that combine pencil, charcoal, watercolour, acrylic, pastel, and printed elements.

Earlier and parallel works displayed in her gallery include 'Where the Deep Meets the Dimming Sky' (abstract monoprints on paper), 'Gathering' (sugarlift etching on steel plate), 'Relics' (a series of five lithographs), 'Relic' (a mokulito print assemblage of eighteen pieces), 'Hollowed' (watercolour, pencil, and carving on found plywood panel), 'Uncharted Topographies' (mokulito and woodcut triptych on Japanese washi), 'Cascade' (water-based woodblock print assemblage on Japanese washi, eight panels), 'Support Structures' (mixed-media print combining wood lithography, etching, and woodcut), and the earlier woodcut series Landforms (2017).

Desforges's parallel teaching practice is unusually broad: she runs short courses on mokuhanga at WYPW (Mirfield), Hot Bed Press (Salford), Handprinted (Bognor Regis), and York Art Gallery, plus 1-1 tuition sessions in mokulito, mokuhanga, and etching. She is profiled by Handprinted's 'Meet the Maker' series, has been featured in West Yorkshire Print Workshop's mokuhanga programming since approximately 2020, and runs the Kathryn Desforges Studio Crowdfunder programme 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 Northern English contemporary printmaking community organised around West Yorkshire Print Workshop, Hot Bed Press, and the Highpoint Center / SGCI cohort of mokuhanga adopters.