#127 Spinning Round Round, I Fell

A wood engraving rather than an etching, "Spinning Round Round, I Fell" steps outside Hayashi's customary intaglio register and into the end-grain wood medium worked with a burin. Wood engraving cuts white lines into a dense black field, and the title's image of dizzying rotation followed by collapse suggests radiating or spiralling incisions opening pale highlights against the printed ground. The shift in process is consistent with a long-running artistic practice in which the numbered sequence allows occasional excursions into adjacent matrices. By 2010 Hayashi had been working in his pared-back personal vocabulary for more than two decades, and a wood engraving at #127 reads as a deliberate change of tool rather than a departure from the underlying graphic language: the same calligraphic instinct, redirected through the burin's harder, more constrained line. The vertiginous title also marks a relatively rare moment of bodily, narrative incident in a body of work otherwise weighted toward sign and atmosphere.