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 (black ink) theme, which favors restrained tonal registers and the textural qualities of carved kento-aligned blocks pulled with the baren onto 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.