Michaela Wheater

"Michaela Wheater" extends Andrea G. Artz's series of mokuhanga portraits, in which photographic likenesses are reconstructed through Japanese water-based woodblock printing. The medium reverses some of the assumptions of photographic portraiture: where the camera resolves continuous tone in an instant, mokuhanga builds the same range of values across multiple impressions, each carried on a separately carved block and registered against kentō marks. The result is a likeness that has been deliberately analysed and reassembled rather than directly captured. Artz's mokuhanga work relies on conventional materials of the tradition — [washi](/glossary/washi), water-based pigments, the [baren](/glossary/baren) — and its conventional techniques, including [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradient inking for soft tonal transitions. Within her wider practice, the portraits share their subject matter with the three-dimensional folded paper figures that anchor her recent site-specific installations, both bodies of work returning to the human figure and its presence in space. As a single printed sheet, however, the woodblock portrait remains in two dimensions, holding the sitter in a flat field built up layer by layer rather than rising off the paper into actual sculptural form.