Untitled work by Poonam Athalye

This untitled print exemplifies Poonam Athalye's practice in mokuhanga, the water-based Japanese woodblock technique she pursues through her London-based project 'Limbu Timbu.' Working with hand-carved blocks, washi paper, and a baren for hand-burnishing, Athalye's prints draw on the visual vocabularies of both her Marathi heritage and traditional Japanese printmaking. Untitled works occupy a particular place in contemporary mokuhanga practice — they invite viewers to engage with surface, registration, pigment density, and the layered evidence of successive impressions without the directing frame of a descriptive title. The water-based pigments characteristic of mokuhanga produce softer transitions than oil-based Western relief printing, and bokashi gradations are achieved by brushing pigment unevenly across the block before printing. Athalye's broader output spans illustration and children's content alongside her woodblock work, and her prints reflect over a decade of narrative image-making translated into the disciplined registration and layered colour of the mokuhanga medium.