Fragments (15)

Fragments (15), a 2025 mixed-media print on plywood, foregrounds the conceptual premise of the series: image as remnant rather than depiction. Rather than presenting a unified scene, the Fragments works build up partial forms — passages of printed colour, carved marks, and exposed substrate — that read as broken-off pieces of a larger, unrecoverable whole. This compositional logic distinguishes the series from traditional mokuhanga genres such as meisho-e or kacho-e, where the image is fully resolved within the sheet. Desforges's water-based printing produces the soft-edged, absorbed quality characteristic of nishiki-e tonality, but the plywood ground refuses the brightness washi gives to colour, instead returning a muted, woodgrain-inflected register. The number 15 in the sequence indicates a relatively advanced stage in Desforges's working through of the concept, by which point variations tend to refine rather than introduce vocabulary. The series is consistent with the pared-back, attention-driven practice Desforges has described as emerging from her 2018 month-long residency in Japan.