Kikori

Kikori, the Japanese word for woodcutter, titles this color mokuhanga print from the late twentieth century. Joshua Rome invokes a figure from Japan's rural past whose labor, felling and sectioning timber in mountain forests, connected human communities to the wooded landscapes surrounding them. The oban-format print uses water-based pigments and hand-carved cherry-wood blocks to build layered color fields that suggest forest density and the interplay of light and shadow among trees. There is an inherent circularity in using a woodblock print, itself cut from wood, to depict a woodcutter, and this material self-reference is consistent with Rome's interest in the relationship between mokuhanga as a craft and the natural world that supplies its materials. The late twentieth-century date positions this print within Rome's established practice in Japan.