Purification

The title evokes misogi, the Shinto rite of cleansing in running water, a theme rooted in Aida's childhood at Jindai-ji, the western Tokyo temple district whose water shrine she has identified as the source of her aquatic imagery. Aquatint suits the depiction of moving water: spit-bite and stop-out resists allow for the irregular, non-linear tonal patterning of currents, eddies, and submerged reflection without descriptive outline. The print likely organises its water imagery around a central reflective field, building stage-bitten passages that read both as surface and depth. Within Aida's body of work, water functions less as illustrated subject than as meditative ground: her London-period prints repeatedly return to streams, ponds, and ritual basins — a vocabulary linking her training under Japanese painters at Tokyo University of Art and Design to the printmaking she pursued at the Royal College of Art.