Varied Editions Featured Artist


Offsite & Online
Varied Editions Featured Artist
Elizabeth Forrest
February 12, 2016 – March 12, 2016

Varied Editions Online Exhibition: Elizabeth Forrest

My current work is based on photographs and drawings made during trips to Newfoundland and to Western Japan. Though very different, Newfoundland and Japan are island-bound societies where the geography impacts powerfully to shape their unique cultures and values. My work contains landscape elements affected by intrusive memories and observations suggesting the process of personalization of places deeply experienced. —Elizabeth Forrest

A graduate of Glendon College, (B.A.) and the Ontario College of Art, Forrest then studied Japanese woodblock at Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto Japan. The Japanese term, mokuhanga (lit. “wood print”) is a contemporary term describing a traditional waterbased relief print medium requiring the carving of an image in a fine-grained wood, followed by multiple colour printing entirely by hand, using thick horse hair brushes to apply pigment and a baren to impress a Japanese mulberry paper on the wet ink. Forrest is interested in referencing traditional flat, mottled, embossed or blended surface qualities in tight registration, while employing a hybrid style (Western and Japanese) in carving. Recently she has begun to combine the medium with photo silkscreen.

Forrest’s work has been collected by The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, The National Library of Canada, and Toronto Public Library, Special Collections, The Bank of Montreal, the Union Bank of Switzerland and many other corporate and private collections. In 2014 she exhibited at the Canadian embassy in Tokyo, and won a prize at the International Mokuhanga Exhibition at Tokyo Fine Arts University. Her work is also represented in Japanese Woodblock Print Workshop, by April Vollmer (Watson/Guptill 2015), The Woodcut Artist’s Handbook by George Walker (Firefly Books, 2005), and the U.K. second edition of Japanese Woodblock Printing by Rebecca Salter, (Thames Books 2013). She has taught many workshops in mokuhanga both in Toronto and by invitation in Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Sherbrooke, Quebec.

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