Untitled

Part of Maurstig's ongoing Mokumap series, this untitled sheet treats the woodblock print as a form of mapping. The series investigates the affinity between mokuhanga's sequential registration of blocks and the layered logic of cartography: contours, hatchings, and tonal zones built up impression by impression. Water-based pigments absorbed into [washi](/glossary/washi) yield the soft edges that distinguish mokuhanga from oil-based relief printing, lending map-like compositions a sense of weather and time rather than fixed survey. Maurstig works from a base in Jølster in Sunnfjord, and the coastal geography of western Norway runs as an undercurrent through the Mokumap project: fjords, islets, shifting tidelines. Her engagement with the medium dates to the 2006 Nagasawa Art Park Project (NAPP), the residency that preceded the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory, and the series sits within a wider international community of artists adapting Japanese woodblock to non-Japanese subject matter and graphic vocabularies.