Fragments Print 2

Fragments Print 2 (2025) extends the editioned mokuhanga subset of Desforges's Fragments series, working within the colour palette and woodblock matrices established by the first print. Mokuhanga's water-based process readily supports bokashi — graded tonal transitions produced by brushing pigment unevenly onto the block before printing — and Desforges's abstract compositions across this series rely on this kind of soft modulation rather than on hard-edged colour fields. As the second sheet in the run, the print reorganises the same fragmentary forms into a different overlay sequence, producing a variant rather than a repetition. This generative approach to a fixed set of blocks reflects the wider working method Desforges developed after her 2018 Japan residency, in which she carved and printed in a single room for eight hours a day. The piece sits within her broader project at WYPW of treating mokuhanga as a contemporary studio medium for abstraction, distinct from the meisho-e or bijin-ga traditions historically associated with the technique.