Fixing Hair

Fixing Hair shows a figure engaged in the intimate gesture of arranging her own hair, a motif with a deep history in Japanese print: from Utamaro's [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) of women at toilet to Goyō's early-twentieth-century shin hanga studies of a single woman absorbed in personal grooming. Lyon's treatment carries this iconography into a contemporary, photographically derived register. The raised arms frame the head and create a closed, self-contained composition, with the tilt of the neck and the line of the elbow giving the print its principal rhythms. As with Lyon's other figurative mokuhanga, the image is built from a halftone pattern carved into woodblocks by CNC and printed by hand on [washi](/glossary/washi) with water-based pigments, producing photographic tonality through accumulated small marks rather than continuous wash. The print thus reads as both a contemporary studio observation and a deliberate citation of the bijin-ga lineage, situating Lyon's practice within the historical continuum of the Japanese print while extending it through digital-fabrication technique.