Hibiki 3

The title Hibiki (響) translates as resonance, echo, or reverberation, and Bligh used the term across a numbered series of abstract mokuhanga in which layered pigment fields suggest acoustic phenomena rendered visually. Hibiki 3 deploys successive impressions from multiple cherry-wood blocks, each carrying a thin water-based pigment, with [kento](/glossary/kento) registration aligning overlapping zones so that color values stack and partially cancel. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations — produced by brushing pigment unevenly across the block before each pull of the [baren](/glossary/baren) — soften transitions between fields, generating the optical equivalent of decaying sound. The [washi](/glossary/washi) base allows pigment to settle into the fibers rather than sit on the surface, so each layer reads through those above it. Within Bligh's wider practice, the Hibiki series exemplifies the abstract, meditative idiom she developed in Kyoto: technically traditional in its tools (cherry plank, baren, water-based pigment) but conceptually aligned with late-twentieth-century Western abstraction.