Red to Port

The title invokes the IALA Region A buoyage convention observed in Irish waters, in which a red can mark is kept to port when entering harbor from seaward. The print is presumed to isolate one such navigation buoy — its red conical or can-shaped body, topmark, and reflected wake — against an open ground of water. Mokuhanga handles this kind of single-subject maritime composition cleanly: a keyblock for the buoy's silhouette and rigging detail, a separate block of saturated red registered into it, and bokashi-graded blocks for the surrounding water, printed in successive impressions on washi with a baren. The flat color areas and absence of cast shadow follow the medium's own logic rather than borrowing from etching's tonal modeling. Within Early's body of work, the print belongs alongside her lighthouse studies as a record of the working furniture of the coast — fixed and floating aids to navigation that mark the threshold between sea and harbor — and reflects the architect's instinct to draw the elements that organize a landscape rather than the landscape itself.