Deborah Hercun

Working from a photographic sitting, Artz reduces the continuous tonal range of the source image into the discrete fields demanded by mokuhanga. A key block carries the drawing; additional blocks carry colour and tone, each cut from cherry or shina and aligned to the others by kento registration marks. Pigments are water-based, brushed onto the block before each impression and pressed by hand into dampened washi with a baren. Because the pigment soaks into the paper fibres rather than sitting on the surface, edges soften and the print takes on a slightly diffuse quality appropriate to features such as hair and skin shadow. Within Artz's wider practice, the printed portrait functions as the flat correlate to the folded paper figures of her installation work — both depend on the same source likeness, processed through different physical transformations.