Tara Chittenden

Tara Chittenden is a portrait print by Andrea G. Artz, executed in mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock technique. As with others in the artist's portrait series, the image originates in a photographic study and is then separated into colour blocks — typically shina or cherry — that are printed in succession on dampened washi using water-based pigments and a baren. The kentō registration system aligns each layer precisely. Mokuhanga's pigments penetrate rather than coat the paper, producing a matte surface in which the woodgrain remains faintly visible, and bokashi gradations are pulled across the blocks by hand for tonal transitions. Within Artz's broader practice, prints of this kind are not always end-points: she has used flat printed portraits as the raw material for folded, three-dimensional paper sculptures and installations, in which the figure is reconstructed in space. Read in that context, Tara Chittenden functions both as a finished portrait in the woodblock tradition and as a possible source-sheet for the artist's sculptural work.