Rosalind Hobley

A portrait of Rosalind Hobley realised in mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock technique that Artz adopted as a way of translating her photographic practice into a hand-printed medium. The image is built from a sequence of carved cherry or shina blocks, each inked with water-based pigment and brought into register on the sheet by means of kentō notches cut into the block edges. The resulting impression on washi carries the slightly inset, absorbed quality of mokuhanga, where pigment soaks into the paper rather than sitting on its surface. As in Artz's other single-name portraits, the subject is treated as an individual rather than a type, with the title naming the sitter directly. The portrait belongs to a body of work in which she uses mokuhanga to test how much photographic information can be preserved—and how much must be reinterpreted—when an image is reduced to a small number of carved blocks. The print stands alongside her three-dimensional folded portraits as another way of giving the photograph a physical, hand-made form.