Mandi Stewart

"Mandi Stewart" is one in Andrea G. Artz's sequence of mokuhanga portraits, each titled with the name of an individual sitter and built out of layered impressions taken from carved wooden blocks. Artz's mokuhanga practice draws on her training as a portrait photographer and on the MFA work she undertook at the University of Leeds, where her interdisciplinary approach — across installation, sculpture, photography, collage, and print — took shape. The water-based Japanese tradition suits her interests well: the absorbent washi accepts multiple translucent layers without building up the heavy pigment film of oil-based relief printing, and the use of bokashi allows tonal modulation that approximates the grayscale of a photograph. The portrait series functions as a flat correlate to the artist's three-dimensional folded paper figures, both bodies of work returning to the human figure as a sustained subject. As a single sheet rather than a constructed object, the print holds the sitter in the static frame of the photograph from which it was derived, but rebuilt through the slow, additive logic of the woodblock.