IMC 2024 Echizen submission

Artz's submission to the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference held in Echizen, the historic washi-producing region of Fukui Prefecture. As an IMC exhibition piece, the work was made specifically for an audience of mokuhanga practitioners and would have been printed on locally produced kozo paper appropriate to the conference's setting. Consistent with Artz's interdisciplinary practice, the print extends her translation of photographic portraiture into the water-based woodblock idiom, using carved blocks and baren-applied pigment to reconstitute imagery first captured by camera. The Echizen context is significant: the region's papermakers supply many of the sheets used in contemporary mokuhanga, and submitting work there situates the print within a dialogue between the artist's London studio practice and the Japanese material tradition she has adopted. The piece reflects her continuing interest in how the human figure survives the move from digital file to carved matrix to folded, dimensional paper object — the central concern of her recent installation work.