Cheshire

The title likely refers to the Cheshire cat of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a British literary figure that carries specific resonance for an artist who has been based in London since the late 1980s. Aida's aquatint version probably plays on the character's defining trait — its capacity to fade, leaving only a grin — a visual idea that aquatint is well equipped to render, since the medium can dissolve a figure into a tonal field through carefully graded bites and selective burnishing of the plate. The choice of subject signals the bicultural position Aida has occupied since relocating from Tokyo: a printmaker trained in the Japanese fine-art tradition working with European literary motifs. Within her body of work, Cheshire sits alongside her other animal and figurative prints as a counterpart to the rain and water imagery she is most associated with, extending the range of her practice without departing from its atmospheric register.