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](/glossary/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.