
Untitled
- Image courtesy of
- Artist website (Sylvia Waltering)
Description
Without explicit subject identification, this Untitled print belongs to Waltering's exploratory mokuhanga output, which translates her photographic vocabulary into the layered, water-based language of Japanese woodblock printing. Working in the contemporary mokuhanga tradition rather than the historic [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) idiom, she would have used kozo [washi](/glossary/washi) sized with dosa, blocks cut with hangi-tō and kiridashi, and applied pigment with a [baren](/glossary/baren) over registered [kento](/glossary/kento) marks. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations and overprinting allow tonal effects analogous to the exposure controls familiar from her training in photography at Manchester Metropolitan University. The decision to leave the print untitled is consistent with practices in contemporary printmaking circles such as Hot Bed Press, where work is often shown in series and titles foreground material process over narrative content. The print exists within Waltering's broader investigation of how photographic seeing translates into the discrete impressions of relief printmaking.



