Sophie Richter

The block remembers every cut. Woodcut is an unforgiving medium: once a line is carved away, it cannot be put back, so every mark I make has to be decided before the knife touches the wood. I work at a large scale, sometimes joining four or five panels together, because I want the physical labour of carving to be visible in the final print, the strain of the arm, the resistance of the grain. My subjects are usually ordinary interiors, kitchens, stairwells, waiting rooms, rendered at a size that makes them feel monumental. I ink and print everything by hand using a custom-built press in my studio, which means no two prints from the same block are ever quite identical. That variation matters to me. It keeps the work connected to the body that made it, rather than to a perfectly repeatable industrial process.