Udaipur-based printmaker and research scholar Naina Somani brings figures out of the woodblock through slow, deliberate carving, making prints that treat imperfection, pressure and the grain of the material as part of the meaning.
Udaipur is a city of layered movement: the general hustle and quiet, the people passing through, the particular texture of a place that holds both peace and chaos at once. For Naina Somani, who has spent most of her life moving through it, the people she encounters become inadvertent muses. They find their way into her work not as portraits but as presences, figures that emerge from the wood the way memory surfaces: slowly, imperfectly, with marks that cannot be erased.
People, Pressed in Wood is a series of hand-carved woodcut prints that explores the human condition through the particular logic of the medium. Each figure is excavated from the block rather than placed onto it, the carving working as a process of revelation. The uneven cuts, the directional marks, the interruptions of natural grain: these are not errors to be corrected but evidence of a process that insists on its own physicality.
“In a world that moves digitally and instantly, woodcut insists on slowness,” Somani says. “The pressure of the hand becomes part of the narrative.”
That slowness is the work’s argument as much as its method. The prints carry themes of memory, silence and emotional weight, but they carry them through material resistance rather than illustration. The tension between what the carver intends and what the wood allows defines the visual language throughout, and Somani has developed a practice attuned to that negotiation. Woodcut, for her, is a meditative process in which each stroke channels thought and imagination into a form that is at once controlled and genuinely open to what the material wants to do.
The figures themselves are vessels as much as subjects. Somani describes her works as holding “hidden truths waiting to be unveiled, a symphony of pauses, prompts, and gestures, both deliberate and unintentional.” They are prints that ask to be looked at slowly, that reward the kind of attention the process of making them demanded.
Naina Somani is a freelance artist, printmaker and research scholar based in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Her practice is rooted in the human realities she observes in the city around her, exploring the sensitivity she holds towards the lives of people and the natural world.
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People, Pressed in Wood. Hand-carved woodcut prints on paper. Oil-based and water-based relief ink. Photography: Naina Somani.
