Ann Robinson

A portrait whose title names a contemporary individual rather than a type figure. The New Zealand cast-glass artist Ann Robinson, born 1944, is a senior figure in Pacific studio craft; if the print depicts her, it joins a thread of cross-medium artist portraiture running through the named subjects in this series. Mokuhanga's water-based pigments and baren-burnished impressions onto absorbent kozo washi yield a soft-edged tonal surface well suited to portraiture, where the printmaker controls the depth of shadow through bokashi gradation worked directly across the block face during printing. For the 2021 IMC exhibition organized around the theme of sumi, prints submitted to the juried show typically foregrounded the carbon ink's tonal range over polychrome decoration, returning to the monochrome lineage that precedes the late-eighteenth-century rise of nishiki-e color printing. Reed's participation places his practice within the international mokuhanga community that gathers triennially in Japan to share technique and exhibit work outside the commercial print circuit.