Mariko Jesse

Mariko Jesse is an illustrator and mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) printmaker whose cross-cultural background shapes both her commercial and fine-art work. Born in Japan, she spent her childhood in Hong Kong and studied at Central Saint Martins in London, where she later taught as an associate lecturer; she now divides her time between California, London, and Hong Kong. As a co-founder of the printmaking collaboratives wood+paper+box and the Mokuhanga Sisters, she has helped build international networks among contemporary mokuhanga practitioners.

Jesse studied mokuhanga at the Nagasawa Art Park residency in Japan — the program that became MI-Lab — and water-based woodblock printing has been central to her practice ever since. Her work bridges the commercial and fine-art spheres: she takes on illustration commissions while dedicating substantial time to studio printmaking. Her prints often feature botanical subjects, garden scenes, and food-related imagery rendered with a warmth and intimacy that reflects her domestic and culinary interests, and she also extends mokuhanga into the book-arts format.

wood+paper+box, which Jesse co-founded with Katie Baldwin and Yoonmi Nam, grew out of the friendships the three formed at the Nagasawa Art Park residency. She is also a co-founder of the Mokuhanga Sisters, an international collective of nine women mokuhanga artists who met at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory (MI-LAB) in Japan between 2017 and 2019 and have since exhibited and taught together; their exhibition "Between Worlds" was shown at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn. Jesse's mokuhanga work has been shown in connection with the International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara (2021) and the 2024 conference, and she has exhibited at the Udatsu Paper & Craft Museum in Echizen, Japan.