Hannah Kidd

This print from Michael Reed's portrait cycle takes its title from Hannah Kidd, the New Zealand sculptor whose figurative works in welded steel rod and corrugated iron skin translate everyday subjects into open armatures. Reed's mokuhanga portrait sits within a body of work that documents fellow artists through the carved block, where each contour must be cut by hand and each registration mark hand-aligned. The medium's resistance — the necessity of reducing a face to discrete printed planes, the controlled bleed of water-based pigment into [washi](/glossary/washi) fibres — produces a portrait that records not only the sitter but the labor of the printmaker. Reed's participation in the juried international exhibition at the 2021 IMC in Nara placed work like this within a global conversation on [sumi](/glossary/sumi), where the portrait genre intersected with the conference's focus on black ink as both a structural and expressive material. Printed with the [baren](/glossary/baren) on dampened washi, the sheet carries the hand-pulled surface character that distinguishes mokuhanga from relief prints made on a press.