Eleanor Street

Tagged as an urban scene, this print departs from Artz's predominantly portrait-based output to address the street as subject — Eleanor Street being a road in east London, in the Mile End area, and a plausible setting for an artist whose studio practice has long been based in the city. The mokuhanga treatment of a built environment exchanges the photograph's spatial depth for a layered system of carved blocks: each architectural plane, sign, and shadow becomes its own field, cut on cherry or shina, inked with water-based pigments and printed with a baren onto dampened washi. The format recalls the meisho-e tradition of nineteenth-century Japanese printmaking, in which named places were rendered in series for an urban audience that recognised them. Artz's concern with the human figure does not disappear here; it shifts to a question of how a street is configured by the bodies that have passed along it — a continuity with the installation practice that places her folded paper figures into specific built spaces.