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 onto dampened 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.