Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith, one of America’s leading artists, has been showing work in a wide range of media including sculpture, printmaking, glass, and textiles since the 1970s, with a consistent focus on the human body and the cycles of life. She drew global attention in 2022 when she was selected alongside Yayoi Kusama to create permanent mosaic murals for the new Grand Central Madison terminal in New York.

The woodcut print Paper Wasps Nest, produced through Smith’s collaboration with the Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints, depicts a wasps’ nest on a pine branch. For this work, the team set out to reproduce the four-color system used in modern printing — known as CMYK for cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K) — using the traditional woodcut technique of layering water-based pigments on washi paper. The result demonstrates what becomes possible when an artist’s original vision meets the highly refined skill of today’s master carvers and printers, opening up new horizons in woodcut printmaking.

Paper Wasps Nest: Concept and Process

The new woodcut print Paper Wasps Nest, a collaboration between the internationally acclaimed artist Kiki Smith and the Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints, grew out of a challenge posed by Smith herself: could the four-color system used in standard printing, employing cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K), be reproduced in a traditional woodcut print by layering water-based pigments on washi paper?

The production process had the following stages.

・Rather than a finished image, the artist provided separate line drawings for each of the four colors (C, M, Y, K).
・The carver pasted each drawing onto a woodblock and carved them one color at a time.
・The C, M, and Y blocks were printed sequentially in a process of subtractive color mixing, in which overlapping colors gradually shift toward a gray approaching black.
・The black (K) key block was then overprinted to define the contours and structure of the image.
・Finally, the clear blue sky visible through the hornets’ nest hanging in the pine tree was rendered using the bokashi gradation that is a hallmark of ukiyo-e.

The completed Paper Wasps Nest is a work that points to new possibilities for woodcut printmaking, emerging from the meeting of Kiki Smith’s original vision and the advanced skills of contemporary carvers and printers.