Dawn Finn

Artz's mokuhanga portraits begin with a photographic sitting and end in a set of carved cherry or shina blocks pulled by hand onto dampened washi. The translation between media is not mechanical: a portrait photograph must be reduced to a finite set of tonal layers, each block cut separately and registered to the others by kento marks. Bokashi — the graded inking pulled across a single block — is the technique that comes closest to the continuous tone of a photographic print, and it tends to carry the modelling of the face and the soft fall of light across skin. The labour of the medium acts as a deliberate slowing of the photographic gesture: where the camera captures in an instant, the woodblock returns to the same image over weeks of cutting and printing. Artz developed this interdisciplinary approach during her MFA at the University of Leeds and has continued it from her London studio.