Francesca Centioni

Mokuhanga demands a finite tonal vocabulary — only what can be cut into separate blocks of cherry or shina, registered by [kento](/glossary/kento), and printed by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren) on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) — and Artz uses that constraint to slow down the act of portraiture. Where the camera records a face in an instant, the woodblock returns to the same face over weeks, through carving, inking, and successive impressions. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), the graded inking pulled across a single block, does much of the work of modelling skin, shadow, and the transition from figure to background. Artz, who trained as a portrait photographer before her MFA at the University of Leeds, treats this protracted second encounter with the sitter as the substance of the work. The print is the static document of that meeting, while the folded paper figures of her installations represent another, three-dimensional outcome of the same photographic source.