Tanya Haye

Tanya Haye is a mokuhanga portrait print by Andrea G. Artz, made by translating a photographic study into the Japanese water-based woodblock medium. The technique requires the source image to be reduced to a small number of tonal or colour layers, each carved into a separate block — usually of shina or cherry — and printed in registration via kentō marks. Pigments are mixed with water and rice paste and burnished into dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), so that the colour is absorbed into the fibres rather than deposited on top. Where a photograph captures a sitter in one mechanical instant, the woodblock portrait accumulates the likeness through repeated hand-pulled impressions. Artz, whose training began in portrait photography in Germany before her MFA at the University of Leeds, treats mokuhanga as a way of materialising the photographic image. Tanya Haye sits within this body of work and within her broader practice of folded paper sculptures and installations, where the printed portrait can also serve as a constructed, three-dimensional object.