Ice Floe, Utoro (Utoro ryūhyō)

Created in 1995 as an artist's proof, Ice Floe, Utoro depicts the drift ice that arrives each winter along the coast of Utoro, a fishing town on the northeastern shore of Hokkaido facing the Sea of Okhotsk. The ryuhyo, or drift ice, travels south from Russian waters and transforms the coastline into an arctic landscape of broken white sheets and blue-green water. Chizuko combines photoetching and color woodblock printing to render this subject, using the photographic precision of etching for the ice's fractured surfaces and the woodblock's broader color fields for sea and sky. The Hokkaido coastline in winter is one of Japan's most extreme landscapes, and Chizuko's choice to depict it reflects her interest in nature at its most elemental and abstract.