Inamura

Inamura refers to stacks of harvested rice straw — the conical or columnar piles of dried rice plants left standing in fields after the autumn harvest. The subject belongs to the long tradition of agricultural and rural imagery in Japanese landscape art, where the changing labors and forms of the rice field marked the year's passage. As a compositional motif, inamura offer a vocabulary of repeating geometric volumes set against open ground, well suited to the planar sensibility of woodblock printing. The mokuhanga technique permits the printmaker to register the fibrous quality of straw through carved texturing of the block and through the gentle absorption of pigment into washi. Bokashi gradations across the sky and ground specify the time of day and atmospheric condition. Joshua Rome's body of work engages with the rhythms of rural Japan and the visual structures these rhythms produce, and a print on this subject sits within his sustained attention to the Japanese countryside as a printmaking subject worked through the traditional medium.