Victorian Invention: Bicycle

A treatment of the Victorian-era bicycle, an object that became a symbol of women's emancipation in the late nineteenth century by freeing women from corseted constraint and chaperoned travel. Oda's mokuhanga rendering translates the spoked wheels and tubular frame into flat graphic shapes registered through multiple woodblock impressions, each color requiring its own carved block printed by hand with a baren onto washi. The piece sits within Oda's vocabulary of feminist iconography, where machines, animals, and historical motifs become vehicles for celebrating female autonomy. Unlike the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) or meisho-e (famous places) categories of Edo-period ukiyo-e, this work belongs to the late-twentieth-century tradition of contemporary mokuhanga, in which artists extended the technique into autobiographical and political subject matter.