M A S A B A N Exhibition at Udatsu Paper & Craft Museum, Echizen, Fukui, Japan
3rd - 6th April 2024
The Mokuhanga Sisters were honoured to present a suite of nine newly created woodblock prints at the Udatsu Paper & Crafts Museum in Echizen during the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference.
‘In this series of works, paper is our muse. Working with a half sheet (masaban) of washi paper and sumi ink, each artist in the Mokuhanga Sisters collective works in the technique of mokuhanga to create a woodblock print. Mokuhanga is an ancient technique of water-based woodblock printing, where imagery is carved into wood, inked, and transferred to the paper by applying pressure with a handheld disk called a baren. The result is a suite of nine works on paper, each printed in an edition of 5. Each sheet of paper for this project was made by artisans from the village of Echizen using traditional papermaking methods. Through the materials of paper, wood, and ink made from soot, we explore the color black. The nine prints exhibited together explore the absence of color, positive and negative space, texture and form, line and shape. As artists, we consider the physicality of materials and what it means to make work by hand.’
Between 2017 - 2019, nine artists met by chance at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Kawaguchi-ko, Japan, and catalyzed the formation of the Mokuhanga Sisters print collective. We are Katie Baldwin (USA), Patty Hudak (USA), Mariko Jesse (UK/USA/HK), Kate MacDonagh (Ireland), Yoonmi Nam (USA/Korea), Natasha Norman (South Africa), Mia O ( Japan/Korea), Lucy May Schofield (UK), and Melissa Schulenberg (USA).