Description
Okawara Woodcut Prints
Seema Kohli’s woodcut works depict the female form not as portrait or anatomy, but as an emblematic structure that can hold cosmology, ecology, and transformation at once. Presented as 10 works in woodcut print on Okawara Select paper, these prints are backlit, intensifying their graphic language and making the figure read like an icon held in illumination. Two additional large works appear as woodcut on Schoelershammer paper, where scale amplifies the sense of the body and bird as a world, not an object.
Formally, the series is driven by high-contrast black and white, with tone built through hatching, stippling, and repeating motifs rather than modeled shading. Kohli organizes images through strong axes and stable zones, then activates them with competing line systems: wave-fields against stippled ground, woodgrain contours against agitation marks, modular textures against flowing hair and cloud bands. The backlit presentation sharpens figure–ground tensions, so silhouettes, negative spaces, and pattern densities become the primary carriers of emphasis and movement.
Within this structure, the female body appears as multiplicity, vessel, and metamorphic threshold. Multi-armed forms riding a tiger compress a mythic grammar of Śakti, where agency is distributed across many limbs and capacities, and the feminine is articulated as force rather than ornament. Elsewhere, wings, water, roots, and internal vignettes render the body porous, a site where human and nonhuman exchange attributes. Even moments of repetition and alignment, such as tripled figures interrupted by blank rectangular zones, formalize the politics of visibility, withholding, and control through abrupt silences in an otherwise densely worked surface.
From a mythological and ecofeminist perspective, these woodcuts use myth as visual syntax rather than single narrative, with lotus signs, animal mounts, metamorphosis, and liminal landscapes organizing the feminine into states of becoming and passage. Pattern becomes the mechanism of kinship, binding figures to the environment and refusing the fantasy of isolated sovereignty.
