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 on dampened washi. The 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, where Reed exhibited, took sumi black ink as its central theme, so the print likely confines its tonal range principally to gradations of black, employing 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.