Claire Hynds

Claire Hynds is part of Andrea G. Artz's series of mokuhanga sitter portraits, in which photographic source material is rebuilt through Japanese water-based woodblock printing. The carved blocks divide the photograph into discrete fields of colour, each registered against a keyblock so that skin tone, hair and ground are layered across multiple passes of the [baren](/glossary/baren) onto absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi). [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations, achieved by brushing pigment unevenly across a dampened block, allow the soft modelling of the face that photographic capture renders effortlessly but printmaking must approximate through careful inking. The sheet sits within Artz's wider investigation, developed through her MFA at the University of Leeds, of how the photographic portrait behaves once removed from screen or print and re-staged in analogue, hand-worked materials. Like her sculptural installations of folded paper portraits, the mokuhanga prints treat the sitter not as a fixed image but as a presence that can be reconstituted across different physical formats.