Untitled work by Karen Pittman

A further untitled work from Pittman's mokuhanga practice. The medium accommodates a wide range of pictorial approaches — abstract, representational, landscape, figurative — and contemporary practitioners outside Japan have used it for purposes that depart substantially from the ukiyo-e subject categories of bijin-ga, yakusha-e, and meisho-e. What links the contemporary work to its historical forebears is the physical process: a multi-block sequence in which each color and tonal area is carved separately, registered with kento marks, and printed by hand pressure through the baren onto washi prepared with sizing or applied dampened. The resulting impressions retain the slight irregularities of hand printing — minor registration shifts, variation in pigment density across the sheet, the embossed impression of the block edge — that distinguish them from machine-printed reproductions. Pittman's IMC 2024 selection places this practice within an internationally networked field.