OJIZOUSAMA

OJIZOUSAMA depicts Jizō Bosatsu, the bodhisattva venerated in Japan as the guardian of travellers, children, and the souls of the deceased. Stone Jizō figures stand at roadsides, cemetery edges, and temple precincts throughout the country, frequently dressed by devotees in red bibs and knitted caps. Gorni's 2008 print, executed in mokuhanga on kozo paper with sumi ink and watercolours, places this devotional subject within the technical vocabulary of Japanese water-based woodblock printing: pigments bound with rice paste, hand-burnished with a baren rather than mechanical pressure, and absorbed into the long fibres of the kozo sheet. The medium permits soft tonal transitions and the layered, slightly chalky surface characteristic of mokuhanga, distinct from oil-based Western relief printing. Made three years after Gorni began her parallel studio practice at the Brera Academy in 2005, OJIZOUSAMA belongs to the early phase of her sustained mokuhanga research. The choice of an explicitly Buddhist Japanese subject signals her engagement not only with the technique but with the iconographic and devotional traditions surrounding it, a thread that runs through her wider work across sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking.