Caroline Whitehead

Caroline Whitehead is depicted in this woodblock print as part of Andrea G. Artz's ongoing series of mokuhanga portraits drawn from photographic sources. Artz's practice, which she frames around the human figure and its presence in space, engages portraiture as a study of how a sitter occupies and is occupied by the surface that renders them. In mokuhanga, that surface is constructed layer by layer: each carved block deposits a defined area of water-based pigment onto [washi](/glossary/washi), with the registration of successive impressions giving the figure its final form. The reliance on flat color regions and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation, rather than continuous photographic tone, reorganizes the visual information of the source image into something distinct from the photograph it derives from. Within Artz's wider body of work—where portraits are also folded into three-dimensional paper objects for site-specific installation—this two-dimensional print operates as one register of her sustained inquiry into the figure as image, object, and material trace.