Soft Kitty

Soft Kitty takes the domestic cat as its subject, treated through the gentle tonal register that the title's adjective announces. Aquatint is a sympathetic medium for fur: a finely deposited rosin ground bitten in gradations produces the velvety mid-greys that read as short hair seen at close quarters, while wiped highlights can describe the lighter chest and paws. Compared with the sharply graphic neko of Utagawa Kuniyoshi or Takahashi Hiroaki — historic touchstones for printed cats in Japan — Aida's approach is closer to a studio observation, with the animal occupying the plate as a single quiet motif rather than as a narrative actor. The print sits comfortably within her wider catalogue of animal subjects executed in aquatint, alongside birds, fish and insects. It also points to the more domestic and personal register that runs through her London-based practice, in parallel with the more conceptually framed Echo Sounding series. The choice of intaglio over the woodblock idiom her earlier training would have made available is consistent across her mature work, locating her between the Japanese pictorial tradition she emerged from and the European print culture she joined in the late 1980s.