The Falls

The Falls is a contemporary print by Elspeth Lamb, dated 2023 and produced within the artist's mature mokuhanga and mixed-paper studio practice based in Glasgow. Lamb is one of Scotland's most internationally recognized printmakers, a long-time teacher at Glasgow School of Art and a sustained traveler to Japan, where she has refined her command of the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock technique and forged the connections that have made her a familiar figure in the contemporary mokuhanga community. The title The Falls names a waterfall or a place named for one, a familiar Scottish landscape motif and a long-standing East Asian one as well, and a 2023 print bearing this title is likely to use the mokuhanga method's quiet tonal washes and gradated passages to register flowing water without conventional pictorial illusion. The mokuhanga procedure, with its hand-cut blocks, water-based pigments, rice-paste binder, and careful registration, lends itself particularly well to the depiction of moving water, where layered transparent impressions can approximate the eye's experience of flowing tone better than opaque inks. Within Lamb's recent practice, this print belongs to a body of work in which she has continued to refine landscape subjects in a contemporary studio register that combines mokuhanga technique with broader paper-art sensibilities. The work is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/elspeth-lamb-the-falls), which preserves a record of the design under Elspeth Lamb's name.