Dancing With Wood

For over fifty years Naoko Matsubara has worked in, through, with, and about
"wood." She has engaged with the material in its raw and processed form, revelling
in it as her preferred medium for creative expression. From the start she rejected
the rigidity of traditional Japanese woodcut printmaking (ukiyo-e), her heritage,
embracing instead the modernist tenets of self-identity, subjective response, spon-
taneity and freedom of expression, and enhancement of the medium's inherent
qualities. She has, for all intents and purposes, "danced" wood, profoundly and
with conviction. This dance has manifested itself in myriad ways, her own aes-
thetic sense being guided by her personal predilections and impulses at any given
time. Challenging herself to venture within and beyond the conventional bound-
aries of the woodcut, driving her creative processes with new inflections of tech-
nique, she has created a body of work that is consistently rich in content, powerful
in expression, and evocative to the core.