Picture

"Picture" exemplifies Filiatrault's contemporary engagement with mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock tradition that uses [washi](/glossary/washi) paper, [baren](/glossary/baren) burnishing, and pigment bound with rice paste rather than oil-based Western relief inks. The deliberately self-referential title—naming the medium itself—aligns with Filiatrault's broader project of critically reflecting on beliefs and their origins, framing the act of depiction as something to be examined rather than taken for granted. Working from her studio in Baden, Ontario, she adapts mokuhanga's layered key-block and color-block registration far from the form's nineteenth-century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) roots, exploiting the technique's capacity for soft tonal gradation ([bokashi](/glossary/bokashi)) and translucent overlays to build surfaces that draw attention to their own construction. Within her wider practice, which extends to papier-mache sculpture, mixed media assemblage, video, and immersive light installation such as Camping and the Illusion of Emptiness (2024–ongoing), the discrete print operates as a smaller-scale companion to those environments—a site where the question of how images shape cultural memory is pursued through the slow, accretive logic of relief printing rather than the spatial scale of installation.