Untitled work by Alex Mankiewicz

Mokuhanga depends on a specific material vocabulary: hand-carved cherry or shina blocks, water-based sumi ink and mineral pigments, washi paper that has been dampened to receive impression, and the baren, a coiled disc used to transfer colour by pressure of the hand. This untitled print by Mankiewicz emerges from that vocabulary, which he absorbed through his Kyoto training. Unlike Western relief printing, mokuhanga produces no embossment from a press, and pigment sits within rather than on top of the paper fibres, yielding a flatter surface and more diffuse colour edges than oil-based methods. The print's physical character — the slight bleed at colour boundaries, the absorbency of the washi, the variation in saturation across a single colour field — reflects choices made at every stage, from block carving to brush loading.