Tori McLean

Tori McLean is a portrait print by Andrea G. Artz, tagged under the Temples & Shrines theme — a coincidence with the Japanese word tori, the gateway to a Shinto shrine, that the artist's title appears to register. As with the rest of Artz's mokuhanga series, the work begins as a photographic portrait and is translated into the Japanese water-based woodblock medium: the image is separated into colour layers, each cut into a block, and printed on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), using kentō notches for registration. The result is a portrait carrying the chromatic restraint and matte surface of mokuhanga rather than the gloss of a photograph. Artz's practice, developed across photography, sculpture, installation and print, is consistently concerned with the figure and its placement in space; the gentle linguistic echo between the sitter's name and Japanese shrine architecture sits within her broader interest in how images and bodies pass between cultures and materials. The print stands as a portrait first, with that secondary resonance held lightly.