Vortex

Vortex is a contemporary print by Elspeth Lamb, dated 2021 and produced within the artist's established Japanese-influenced studio printmaking practice in Glasgow. Lamb is among the most internationally engaged of Scottish printmakers, a long-time teacher at Glasgow School of Art who has spent decades developing her command of Japanese water-based mokuhanga alongside related paper-art and printmaking techniques, with sustained work and study in Japan as the foundation of her connection to the medium. The title Vortex names a spiraling movement, a fluid or atmospheric eddy, the kind of dynamic visual phenomenon that contemporary mokuhanga, with its capacity for layered translucent impression, has often been used to register without recourse to literal illustration. Lamb's recent prints have explored the relation between gesture, pattern, and atmospheric form in compositions whose impact builds through accumulated washes and decisive linear or planar accents, and a 2021 design bearing the title Vortex would sit naturally within this body of work. The mokuhanga procedure underwrites the work's material identity: hand-cut blocks, water-based pigments, rice-paste binder, and meticulous registration combine to give such prints their characteristic depth-without-opacity. Within her career, the print extends the dialogue between Scottish studio printmaking and Japanese woodblock practice that has long been a central thread of her output. The work is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/elspeth-lamb-vortex), which preserves a record of the design under Elspeth Lamb's name.