London-based printmaker Oceana Masterman-Smith transforms paper into tactile sculpture through blind embossing, hand-carving designs into lino and pressing them into relief to create prints that shift and change as light moves across their surface.
Most prints are read through ink. Oceana Masterman-Smith’s prints are read through light. Blind embossing is a technique where a carved design is pressed into paper through pressure alone, with no ink to carry the image. What remains is a sculptural surface where the impression reveals itself only as light moves across it, casting the raised areas into shadow, lifting others into definition. The image is always there and always slightly different depending on where you stand and how the light falls.
Masterman-Smith returned to her own creative practice in 2024 after years working in curation, discovering lino print before committing fully to embossing as her primary method. The process begins with hand-carving a design into traditional grey lino, with the embossing in mind from the first cut. Areas are carefully removed or left raised to shape exactly how the paper will later respond, forming the structure that will hold both impression and pressure. The carved block is then inked and pressed using a layered reduction process, the image built gradually through successive stages of carving and printing before the final embossed surface is revealed: paper lifted into relief, sculptural and still.
The natural world provides the visual language throughout. Birds moving across open skies, the softness of clouds, petals in wind, the fragility of things that pass through air. A gentle use of colour sits alongside the embossed forms, lending the work a quality of calm that mirrors the stillness she finds in those subjects. But the primary experience is tactile: each print invites touch as much as looking, the paper surface holding its impression the way a landscape holds a moment of light before it changes.
Masterman-Smith works entirely in her London studio, hand-carving, inking and pressing every print herself. Her work is currently on exhibition.
Oceana Masterman-Smith is a London-based printmaker specialising in blind embossing. Her prints are available through her studio and Etsy shop.
Website: oceanamastermansmith.com
Instagram: @oceanams
All embossed prints. Hand-carved, inked and pressed in London.
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