
Stacks Image 23
by Julie Murphy
- Image courtesy of
- Artist website (Julie Murphy)
Description
Catalogued under a portfolio identifier rather than a descriptive title, this print belongs to Julie Murphy's body of contemporary mokuhanga work produced from her Irish studio. Mokuhanga is the Japanese water-based woodblock technique that Murphy has trained in: pigment is applied to the carved cherrywood block with a brush, mixed with rice paste (nori) to bind it, and then transferred to dampened washi paper through hand pressure with a baren. The absence of oil-based ink gives mokuhanga prints a distinctive tonal range — soft, matt, often translucent — and allows pigment to settle into the paper fibres rather than sit on the surface. Murphy's practice forms part of the wider European mokuhanga community that gathered at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference Europe exhibition. Like other Western practitioners, she works at a smaller scale than the historical ukiyo-e workshops but follows the same underlying division between block, pigment, paper, and pressure.



