Pottu

Pottu is Tamil for the dot worn on the forehead, a circular mark of cultural and ritual significance across South Asia, often executed in red kumkum or sandalwood paste. The title's specificity — drawn from a non-Japanese, non-Western tradition of mark-making — situates the print within Jung's broader engagement with cross-cultural pigment and mark vocabularies. The composition centers on a circular form rendered through layered mokuhanga registration on [washi](/glossary/washi), with silkscreen and intaglio passes contributing additional registers of texture and tone. Plant-based red pigment — madder, brazilwood, or another natural dye — is central to the chromatic decision, replacing synthetic reds with materials whose botanical origin connects across the South Asian, Japanese, and broader natural-dye traditions Jung teaches at the University of Iowa. Pottu reflects the artist's willingness to draw nomenclature and compositional reference from outside the dominant Western and Japanese print canons, while keeping the technical execution within the hybrid mokuhanga-silkscreen-intaglio idiom of her recent practice.