Meg Roper

"Meg Roper" is one in Andrea G. Artz's body of mokuhanga portraits, each carrying the name of its sitter as title. The print is built up from a sequence of carved cherry or shina blocks, each inked with water-based pigment and impressed in turn onto a sheet of dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren) — the disc-shaped hand burnisher central to the Japanese tradition. Working from a photographic source, Artz reduces the continuous-tone image to a stack of discrete layers, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) inking applied to individual blocks where soft transitions between tones are required. The repeated registration of multiple impressions, all aligned by the kentō marks cut into each block, gradually constructs a likeness on the paper. The portrait series occupies a particular position within Artz's interdisciplinary practice: where her installation work translates photographic portraits into folded, three-dimensional paper objects that occupy real space, the mokuhanga prints hold their sitters in the flat plane of the sheet. Both bodies of work return to the human figure as their central subject, examining how a photograph carries forward into other materials.