Phillippa Perry

A mokuhanga portrait of the British psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry, translated by Andrea G. Artz from a photographic source into Japanese water-based woodblock printing. Perry is a writer on family relationships and emotional life and a frequent broadcaster, and Artz's portrait practice typically centres the face against a neutral planar ground, allowing the materiality of the print to remain in view. Each color is carved into a separate shina plywood block, brushed with water-based pigment, and pressed onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren), with [kento](/glossary/kento) marks ensuring registration across passes. The continuous tones of the photographic source are condensed into a smaller vocabulary of flat color shapes joined by [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) transitions, so that skin, hair, and clothing read as inked planes rather than photographic surface. The work belongs to Artz's wider series of contemporary cultural figures drawn from across literature, design, visual art, and performance, in which translation between digital photograph and analogue woodblock is itself the subject of the portrait.