Harm Shake Wood Cut Contemporary Printmaking

Rendered in stark black-and-white with a printmaker’s patience, the composition frames a clasped handshake as a monument—part bridge, part boundary—suspended within a diamond of meticulously striated space. A flagpole rises like a fragile axis of authority, while the dark mass of the hands suggests both solidarity and the weight of agreements that eclipse individual agency. Beneath, a bird in flight carries an olive sprig through a star-dusted void, offering a quiet counter-narrative: peace as motion and choice rather than decree. The tension between the dense, sealed central form and the open, drifting lower register turns the work into an allegory of trust—earned, negotiated, and always precariously held.