Hannah Luxton

A mokuhanga portrait from Andrea G. Artz's series of named sitters, hand-printed in her London studio. The water-based woodblock tradition she works in is well suited to bokashi — the graded wash produced by brushing pigment unevenly across the block before printing — and Artz typically exploits this softness in the rendering of skin tones and ambient light, where photographic continuous tone would otherwise have to be approximated with discrete carved layers. The print is built up through successive impressions on dampened washi, each block aligned by kentō marks cut into the wood. Artz came to the technique from a photographic background and an MFA at Leeds, and her adoption of mokuhanga is consistent with a wider practice in which the photographic image is repeatedly translated into more material forms — sculpture, folded paper installations, collage. The portrait here belongs to the print strand of that project: a single sheet, but one that records the same hand-led conversion of a digital likeness into something carved and pulled.