MANZ - Medal Art New Zealand

MANZ - Medal Art New Zealand is the title piece of Reed's mokuhanga series documenting New Zealand artists working in the medal and small-object tradition. The print likely functions as a frontispiece or key image for the series, presenting the project's identity through emblematic forms — possibly a medal-like central motif, typographic elements, or a composite arrangement referencing the body of work that follows. As a participant in the juried international exhibition at the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, Reed was working within that year's [sumi](/glossary/sumi) (black ink) theme, which favors restrained tonal registers and the textural qualities of carved [kento](/glossary/kento)-aligned blocks pulled with the [baren](/glossary/baren) onto [washi](/glossary/washi). The MANZ series sits within Reed's broader practice of using the water-based Japanese woodblock idiom to honor a non-Japanese subject — here, Aotearoa's medal artists — extending mokuhanga's portrait and commemorative lineage into a contemporary cross-cultural register. The framing print establishes the visual vocabulary repeated across the individual artist portraits.