Home for Runaway Girls - Clubs are A Desire for Knowledge

A companion to "Girls are Diamonds," this print extends the runaway girls thematic series with imagery drawing on playing-card iconography — clubs (the suit) recast as a symbol of the desire for knowledge. The compositional logic likely features the club symbol prominently, perhaps repeated, framed, or integrated with figural elements. Shiomi's mokuhanga handling would render these graphic forms through the flat areas of color the medium supports well, with carved keyblock outlines defining the symbol's familiar trefoil shape. The series' subtitle reframes a casual gambling motif into a metaphor for autonomous learning — knowledge sought outside conventional institutions, parallel to the runaway condition itself. Within Shiomi's wider body of work this print sits in a more pictorial and symbolic register than her abstract nature studies. The use of mokuhanga — a slow, labor-intensive process involving carved cherry or katsura blocks, hand-mixed pigments, and baren rubbing — adds material weight to a subject the title treats as a quiet declaration.