Tanya Harris

Tanya Harris is a mokuhanga portrait print by Andrea G. Artz, part of the artist's continuing project of translating photographic likenesses into Japanese water-based woodblock. The image begins as a digital photograph and is reduced to a sequence of tonal layers, each carved into its own block. Printing proceeds layer by layer, with kentō registration cuts ensuring alignment across the sheet and a [baren](/glossary/baren) used to press water-based pigment from the block into dampened [washi](/glossary/washi). The grain of the wood remains subtly legible in the finished impression, giving the portrait a slightly textured surface absent from a photographic print. Artz, who trained as a portrait photographer before completing her MFA at the University of Leeds, has used mokuhanga as a way of slowing the photographic image — turning a single mechanical exposure into a hand-pulled object built up over many separate impressions. Tanya Harris belongs to this body of work, in which the portrait is treated as material to be re-made rather than simply reproduced.