In The Sun

A 2020 mezzotint that, by its title, departs from the nocturnal subjects characteristic of Hayashi's practice. The technical challenge is inverted: mezzotint's natural register is dark, and rendering sunlight requires extensive burnishing of the plate to remove enough tooth that the paper reads as nearly white. Hayashi's interest in light entering interiors — a hand passing into a sunlit room, the surface of water taking light — finds direct expression here. The print is contemporary with the period in which she had been working in Aichi Prefecture for nearly a decade, her practice settled into a small annual output of carefully developed editions. Compared to the dim still lifes of her earlier work, In The Sun foregrounds the upper register of mezzotint's tonal range, where small variations in burnishing produce visible differences. The print confirms that her interest is in slow attention to changing light, not darkness as such.