Cock of the Walk

Cock of the Walk depicts a rooster, the title drawing on the English idiom for a strutting, dominant figure. In the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) tradition that mokuhanga has long served, the subject lends itself to bold silhouettes, distinct comb and tail plumage, and patterned feather work that can be carried by separate blocks for each colour area. As a water-based woodblock print, the work is pulled by hand with a baren onto dampened washi, allowing pigment to sit within the paper fibres rather than on the surface; this typically produces matte, absorbed colour and permits bokashi gradations where pigment is brushed across the block before printing. The print sits within a recent strand of Leonard's practice in which she has added linocut, woodcut, and mokuhanga to a body of work otherwise centred on copper-plate etching and aquatint developed at Graphic Studio Dublin. Her move into Japanese water-based woodblock follows the broader uptake of mokuhanga among Western printmakers since the 2010s, and aligns with the figurative, observational subject matter that characterises her etched output.