Fragments (17)

Fragments (17) departs from the flat works in the same 2025 series by being explicitly sculptural: carved wood with mixed-media, treated as a three-dimensional object rather than a print on a panel. In this iteration the woodblock matrix — the carved surface that elsewhere in mokuhanga functions as the means of producing the image — becomes the work itself. The cuts a Japanese print would normally read as inverted, ink-bearing ridges and ink-shedding troughs are here registered directly on the object, with applied colour, ink, or printed passages added on top. This move is consistent with the broader contemporary mokuhanga turn toward foregrounding the matrix, and with Desforges's own technical fluency: as Print Technician at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop she works fluently between relief, intaglio, and lithographic processes. The piece reframes the Japanese-derived techniques she absorbed during her 2018 residency as something dimensional, situating itself between print and low relief sculpture rather than committing fully to either.