Sheila Woollam

This mokuhanga portrait of Sheila Woollam continues Andrea G. Artz's translation of photographic portraiture into Japanese water-based woodblock printing. Producing a recognizable likeness in mokuhanga places specific demands on carving and registration: facial features must be cut into the woodblock with sufficient precision to retain proportion and expression, while skin tones are built up through successive layers of pigment-loaded blocks pressed onto [washi](/glossary/washi). The medium does not permit the continuous tonal modeling of photography; instead, the portrait emerges from the assembly of distinct color and tonal regions, each carved and printed in turn. Artz's earlier training as a portrait photographer, combined with her MFA work at the University of Leeds, informs her selection of source images and her decisions about which photographic information survives the transfer to woodblock. The print belongs to a body of named-sitter portraits that connects her two-dimensional output to her installation practice, where photographic portraits are folded and constructed into three-dimensional paper forms occupying gallery space.