Biography
Sylvia Waltering is an artist and educator based in Manchester, England, whose practice encompasses photography, artist's books, and Japanese woodblock printing. She holds a BA (Hons) in History of Film, Photography and Graphic Media with Practice from Manchester Metropolitan University (2001) and an MA in Communication Design from the same institution (2002).
Waltering is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at Manchester School of Art and a tutor at Hot Bed Press in Salford, one of the leading open-access print studios in the north of England. Her teaching and artistic practice span multiple disciplines, connecting lens-based media with traditional and experimental printmaking techniques.
Her engagement with mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock printing technique, has become an important strand of her practice. Waltering incorporates the process-oriented, meditative qualities of mokuhanga into work that explores the intersection of image, text, and material. She also collaborates with artist Lucy May Schofield under the name Battenberg Press, producing artist's books and printed matter.
Waltering's work has been exhibited internationally. In 2024, her mokuhanga prints were included in the Juried International Mokuhanga Exhibition at the Imadate Art Museum in Echizen, Japan, as part of the Fifth International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC 2024) Europe-Africa selection. She has also exhibited at the Hepworth Gallery Print Fair in Wakefield, England (2023), and runs a year-long book arts course.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇬🇧United Kingdom
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 7
Frequently Asked Questions
Sylvia Waltering is an artist and educator based in Manchester, England, whose practice encompasses photography, artist's books, and Japanese woodblock printing. She holds a BA (Hons) in History of Film, Photography and Graphic Media with Practice from Manchester Metropolitan University (2001) and an MA in Communication Design from the same institution (2002).
Sylvia Waltering'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.
Sylvia Waltering is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.
