Lynne Blackburn

"Lynne Blackburn" continues Andrea G. Artz's investigation of portraiture through mokuhanga, the analogue Japanese woodblock technique she has adopted as a counterpart to her photographic and installation practice. Artz's interest lies in what is gained and lost when a digital or photographic likeness is rebuilt out of carved blocks, water-based pigment, and hand-burnished [washi](/glossary/washi). The mokuhanga process imposes a small set of decisions on the source image: how many blocks to carve, where edges fall between tones, where [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations soften a transition from light to shadow, and how the pigment will sit on the paper after the [baren](/glossary/baren) has done its work. Each of these decisions inflects the likeness in ways that fully digital reproduction does not. Within the broader portrait series, this print sits alongside other named sitters, forming a collective body of work in which the act of attention to a single individual is repeated as method. The two-dimensional prints share their subject matter — the human figure — with the folded paper portraits that make up Artz's recent site-specific installations.