Echo Sounding 3

Echo Sounding 3 is part of an ongoing series in which Aida works with the imagery and vocabulary of underwater acoustic surveying — the technique by which sonar pulses are sent into water and their returning echoes read to map depth and submerged form. The aquatint is well suited to this premise: stopping out and biting the plate in successive stages produces gradated bands of grey that read simultaneously as water column, sound wave and depth contour. Aida's Echo Sounding sequence belongs to her sustained engagement with aquatic subject matter, a thread she has traced back to her upbringing in Jindai-ji, the temple district in western Tokyo associated with a water shrine. As a numbered work in the series, the third state continues an iterative investigation of layered tonal fields rather than discrete pictorial subjects, aligning her with a strand of postwar Japanese printmakers who used Western intaglio as a vehicle for atmosphere — though here the abstraction remains tied to the material fact of water as something measurable, sounded and traversed.