IMC 2024 Echizen submission

This entry refers to DeMaria's 'Heritage of Plants,' the mokuhanga woodcut measuring 48.3 by 33.0 centimeters that was selected for the juried Americas exhibition at the Fifth International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Japan in 2024. The vertical format approximates an enlarged oban tate-e proportion. As a mokuhanga work, the print would have been pulled from carved blocks using water-based pigments on [washi](/glossary/washi), hand-burnished with a [baren](/glossary/baren) rather than press-printed — the same technical lineage that produced Edo-period [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e), here adapted to a contemporary botanical subject. The conference theme, 'Inheritance and Innovation: Mokuhanga Artists Explore Japanese Paper,' foregrounded the substrate itself, and DeMaria's title gestures toward both the plant fibers (kozo, [mitsumata](/glossary/mitsumata), [gampi](/glossary/gampi)) from which washi is made and the cultural inheritance carried by the technique. The work places her among forty-seven North and South American artists in the Americas exhibition.