Fiona Garlick

This portrait of Fiona Garlick belongs to Reed's series of mokuhanga depictions of fellow contemporary artists, exhibited in connection with his 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference participation in Nara. The single-name title places the work squarely as a likeness rather than narrative composition, and mokuhanga's reliance on the registration of multiple carved blocks shapes the formal approach: facial structure, hair, ground, and any surrounding passages would each be carried by separate woodblocks, registered through kentō marks and printed sequentially with a baren. Reed's choice to translate likeness through this medium pulls the genre away from photographic representation and toward the historical lineage of mokuhanga portraiture, which more commonly depicted actors and beauties than living art-world contemporaries. Within the IMC's sumi theme, color would have been minimized, with bokashi and density variation across black pigment carrying tonal modeling. The work sits within an international conversation about mokuhanga's contemporary range, alongside the practices of other exhibitors at the Nara conference.