Aroha Gossage

Aroha Gossage is a New Zealand painter of Māori descent whose practice engages with whakapapa and figurative themes; Reed's portrait places her within a series documenting fellow practitioners through mokuhanga. Translating a contemporary painter's likeness into the Japanese woodblock medium requires reduction of facial detail to a set of carved planes, each typically carried on a separate block and registered through kentō marks before pulling impressions with a [baren](/glossary/baren) on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi). The 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, where Reed exhibited, took [sumi](/glossary/sumi) black ink as its central theme, so the print likely confines its tonal range principally to gradations of black, employing [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) to achieve modulation across the sitter's features without recourse to color contrast. The work functions as a cross-cultural document: a Māori artist depicted in a Japanese print idiom by a fellow practitioner whose own discipline runs parallel to, rather than within, the painted traditions of his subjects.