Mariko Ando

Mariko Ando (born 1969) is a Japanese-Canadian printmaker and illustrator known for hand-coloured etchings with chine collé that combine the visual codes of Western European intaglio with the picture-book sensibility she developed during a long career in Japanese illustration. Her prints have been described as a 'sinister storybook' world: solitary girls in elaborate dresses, owls, hares, fish, foxes, butterflies, and household objects coexist in lightly threatening domestic interiors and dreamscapes that draw on Edwardian children's-book illustration, surrealism, and the macabre humour of nineteenth-century European print traditions.

Ando grew up between Osaka and Nara in western Japan and trained at Shukugawa Gakuin Junior College in the Illustration and Visual Design programme. Before moving to Canada she spent seven years on staff as an illustrator for a magazine publishing company and continued for more than two decades as a freelance illustrator across Japanese editorial, advertising, and book publishing. In 1998 she received a Special Prize at the Artex Contemporary Art Show in Osaka. She moved to Vancouver in 1999 after marrying a Canadian, and it was in Canada that she encountered traditional intaglio printmaking — etching, drypoint, aquatint, and chine collé — and shifted the centre of her practice from drawing and illustration to printmaking on copper plates.

In 2002 she became a member of the Malaspina Printmakers Society on Granville Island in Vancouver, where she has maintained a studio practice ever since. Working from small copper plates (her image areas typically range from 4x3 to 12x8 inches), she etches a base image, prints it onto handmade paper, hand-colours each impression with diluted watercolour, and often pastes a second sheet of patterned tissue or chiyogami inside the image area as chine collé. Editions are typically small — 20 to 25 impressions — and each is individually signed and numbered. Her image-making vocabulary is consistent across more than two decades of work: a pale-skinned girl with bobbed hair appears repeatedly, joined by anthropomorphic rabbits and birds, household furniture turned into stages, and a recurring cast of insect and floral motifs.

Ando's print awards include an Honourable Mention at the Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition in Vancouver in 2004, an Honourable Mention at the International Mini Print Competition in Rosario, Argentina, in 2005, and a Third Prize at the Open Print Show at Federation Gallery in Vancouver in 2009. She has held solo exhibitions in Japan, Australia, and Canada, and has exhibited in group shows in the United Kingdom, the United States, Argentina, and Italy alongside her North American outings.

In parallel with her print practice she has continued to work as a children's-book illustrator. Her illustrated titles include Crash of Rhinos, Party of Jays (Annick Press, 2006) and Cheetah Cubs and Beetle Grubs (Annick Press, 2007), the hand-bound limited-edition Two Lovers on a Bench (Heavenly Monkey, 2009), The Elves and the Shoemaker (ECC ESL School, Japan, 2010), The Princess Dolls by Ellen Schwartz (Tradewind Books, 2018) — winner of the 2019 Vine Award — and Peggy's Impossible Tale by Sylvia McNicoll (Tradewind Books, 2021), which won the 2023 Chocolate Lily Award.