Untitled work by Karen Pittman

This fifth untitled piece in Pittman's documented mokuhanga output reflects the same set of material choices that define her practice and that of her IMC 2024 cohort. Mokuhanga as practiced today by North American artists typically uses small editions — often under fifty impressions — printed by the artist rather than by a separate carver and printer as was standard in the Edo workshop system. This single-hand approach gives contemporary mokuhanga prints a closer relationship to the artist's process than historical ukiyo-e, where division of labor among designer, carver, printer, and publisher meant the surviving prints were collaborative products. The visible characteristics of water-based woodblock — the absorption of pigment into washi, the soft edges where bokashi gradations have been brushed onto the block, the slight relief of the kento-registered impression — are the same physical signatures regardless of the imagery carried by the print.