Dr Carolyne Larrington

This mokuhanga portrait depicts Dr Carolyne Larrington, the Oxford-based scholar of medieval Norse and Arthurian literature. Artz works from her own photographic portrait of the sitter, transferring the image to a sequence of carved cherrywood blocks and printing by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren) onto [washi](/glossary/washi) using rice-paste-bound water-based pigments. The mokuhanga technique replaces photographic continuous tone with bounded colour fields and the visible grain of the woodblock, producing a portrait that is more contemplative and less indexical than its source. Including a working academic within the portrait series situates Larrington alongside other named contemporary cultural figures — writers, broadcasters, ceramicists — whom Artz has translated into woodblock form. The choice of sitter signals Artz's wider interest in the human figure as a carrier of intellectual and professional life, registered through a quietly attentive print process. The print belongs to her ongoing project of using mokuhanga to mediate between digital photographic capture and a slow, analogue craft tradition.