Edmund de Waal

This mokuhanga portrait depicts the British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, known for his porcelain installations and the family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. Artz translates a photographic portrait of de Waal into water-based woodblock print, carving the image across registered blocks and pressing them onto [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren). The choice of sitter is materially apt: de Waal's own practice centres on the slow making of small objects in series, paralleling the sustained block-by-block labour of mokuhanga. The technique reduces photographic tonal range to flat colour areas defined by carved edges, and the rice-paste-bound pigments leave a soft, matte surface characteristic of contemporary mokuhanga rather than the saturated layering of Edo-period [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e). Within Artz's portrait series, the de Waal print belongs to a group of named contemporary cultural figures whose work in adjacent slow-craft and writing disciplines resonates with the print medium itself, reinforcing her practice's interest in translating between photographic immediacy and the deliberation of woodblock making.