Biography
Sarah Ann Mitchell is a contemporary British printmaker based in London whose practice in Japanese mokuhanga has developed within the recent expansion of the medium in the United Kingdom. Her formal training began with a BTEC Higher Diploma in Art and Design at the Putney School of Art in southwest London (1996–98), followed by a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London (1998–2003). Her route into mokuhanga runs through a sequence of specialized courses: woodcut printmaking at City Lit in London (2019); an online Japanese-woodblock course in 2021 with Zea Mays Printmaking, the Massachusetts studio founded by Liz Chalfin; and intermediate and advanced mokuhanga courses at Morley College in Lambeth across 2022 and 2023. She also took part in the 4th International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2021), held in Nara and online.
Her technical method follows the standard contemporary revival sequence: shina plywood as the block material, hand-carving with Japanese knives and chisels, watercolour pigment brushed onto the block, and hand-impression onto kozo (mulberry) paper with a bamboo baren in successive layers, with each impression slightly varied so that the resulting prints function as a near-edition of unique objects rather than as identical multiples. The subject matter of her recent work is the city read as a kind of text, frequently as a layered interior — the swimming pool, the kitchen, the entrance hall, the train platform — rendered as at once real, imagined, and remembered space. Prints taking public swimming pools and water-park slides as their subject are representative of this register, and examples of her work are available through Saatchi Art and Artfinder.
Mitchell was a selected artist in the juried international exhibition of the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Japan, where she showed the mokuhanga print "Mega Slide" — her highest-profile dedicated mokuhanga presentation to date. Public-collection holdings have not been documented; her presence in the contemporary record is best characterized as that of a London-based printmaker whose mokuhanga practice has been built through the British short-course teaching circuit and the International Mokuhanga Conference exhibition route.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇬🇧United Kingdom
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 3
Frequently Asked Questions
Sarah Ann Mitchell is a contemporary British printmaker based in London whose practice in Japanese mokuhanga has developed within the recent expansion of the medium in the United Kingdom. Her formal training began with a BTEC Higher Diploma in Art and Design at the Putney School of Art in southwest London (1996–98), followed by a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London (1998–2003). Her route into mokuhanga runs through a sequence of specialized courses: woodcut printmaking at City Lit in London (2019); an online Japanese-woodblock course in 2021 with Zea Mays Printmaking, the Massachusetts studio founded by Liz Chalfin; and intermediate and advanced mokuhanga courses at Morley College in Lambeth across 2022 and 2023. She also took part in the 4th International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2021), held in Nara and online.
Sarah Ann Mitchell'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.
