Susan Short

Susan Short is a portrait print by Andrea G. Artz from the artist's series of mokuhanga likenesses translated from photographic source material. The technique — Japanese water-based woodblock printing — requires the original image to be separated into a small number of colour layers, with each layer carved into a separate block, typically of shina or cherry. The blocks are inked with water-based pigments, registered against kentō marks and burnished by hand using a [baren](/glossary/baren) onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi). The pigment soaks into the paper rather than sitting on its surface, producing the matte, slightly absorbed quality characteristic of mokuhanga and softening the photographic source into a print-language of flat planes and quiet tonal shifts. The result records a sitter with the descriptive accuracy of photography but in the material register of an analogue print. Artz's broader practice includes folded three-dimensional photographic portraits and site-specific installations, and the woodblock works function as one node in her larger investigation of how a portrait can be mediated, layered and re-materialised across techniques.