Requiem

Titled after the liturgical mass for the dead, Requiem functions within Aida's iconography as a memorial image rather than a religious one: her requiem prints typically substitute the human figure with floral or aquatic motifs floating in an indeterminate dark ground. Aquatint allows for the velvety blacks characteristic of mourning imagery; extended acid bites through a fine rosin ground produce uninterrupted dark fields against which lighter passages — reserved by stop-out — register as suspended forms. The title also reflects the artist's ongoing interest in transience and dispersal, a sensibility she has linked to growing up beside a water shrine where matter is conceptually carried away by current. Within her wider output, Requiem sits in a sequence of contemplative pieces that depart from her botanical and landscape subjects toward a more abstracted, elegiac register, executed through tonal modulation rather than line.