#11 The Edge — Recording a Life in a Fingertip

"The Edge — Recording a Life in a Fingertip" is an early sheet in Hayashi's numbered sequence, made some thirteen years after his 1987 M.F.A. from Tokyo Geidai. The title's twin emphases on edge and fingertip suggest contact at a boundary: a mark made where pressure concentrates, a record of touch. The print most likely deploys the drypoint and etched line that anchor his practice, with the inked plate-edge bevel and possible plate tone defining the visual periphery of the sheet. Hayashi prints all of his work himself, and the burr of fresh drypoint — soft, accumulating ink at the edge of each scratched line — is the kind of physical residue this title invokes. As one of the lower-numbered works in the long sequence, it predates the more pronounced chine-collé experiments of his later sheets and likely retains a closer relationship to traditional intaglio surface than the more layered prints that follow.