Emotional Space

A companion to Anatomical Space, this reductive woodcut likely figures interior psychological states as spatial diagrams, paralleling the bodily focus of its pair with affective rather than corporeal territory. The reductive method commits the artist to a single block whose surface is progressively pared away as each colour is printed; the final cut completes the edition and exhausts the matrix. Crothers issued the print in an edition of fifty, and impressions are held by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Both Space prints were made in his last year resident in Japan, following the 1996 completion of his Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at Tama Art University, Tokyo, where his practice consolidated around water-based mokuhanga and multiple-block colour woodcut. The [diptych](/glossary/diptych)'s titles register the dual influence of his Australian training and his long Japanese studio period: a Western conceptual framing of body and feeling executed through the layered registration discipline of Japanese woodblock printing, with kentō registration marks aligning each successive pull.