Hamish Allan

Hamish Allan, from Reed's MANZ - Medal Art New Zealand series, is a mokuhanga portrait honoring the New Zealand medallist of that name. Within the series convention, the print likely pairs a likeness or studio reference with motifs drawn from Allan's own object-making — small-scale relief, struck or cast forms, lettering — translated into the carved block. Reed works in the water-based Japanese woodblock tradition, and prints made for the 2021 IMC sumi-themed juried exhibition in Nara would foreground black ink, with tonal modulation achieved through [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations and the burnishing pressure of the [baren](/glossary/baren) on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) rather than through saturated [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) color layering. The [kento](/glossary/kento) registration system permits tightly aligned overprinting of fine line and broader tone blocks, suited to the disciplined geometry medal art shares with the carved matrix. The piece thus operates on two levels: as a portrait of a medallist, and as a meditation on the structural kinship between two relief-printing traditions — the engraved die and the cut woodblock.