Marcia Teusink

"Marcia Teusink" is one of Andrea G. Artz's named portraits in mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock medium central to her recent print practice. The technique relies on [washi](/glossary/washi) — long-fibred Japanese paper — dampened before printing so that pigment is drawn into the sheet rather than sitting on its surface. With each pass of the [baren](/glossary/baren) over an inked block, another layer of tone is added, and the registration marks (kentō) cut into each block hold the overlapping impressions in alignment. Working from a photographic source, Artz reduces the continuous tones of the original to a manageable stack of layers, then carves a block for each. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) — the gradient inking applied directly to the block with a brush — provides the soft tonal transitions that flat inking cannot. Within her wider practice, the portrait series shares its subject matter with the three-dimensional folded paper figures that populate her installations: both treat the human figure as the central concern, but the print stays resolutely on the plane of the paper rather than rising into space.