Metsä 1 (Forest)

Metsä is the Finnish word for forest, and this print belongs to a body of work Ito developed in connection with her 2011 exchange semester at Aalto University School of Arts in Helsinki. Where her pine studies isolate single Japanese specimens, Metsä 1 turns the drypoint needle on the dense conifer woodland of southern Finland — a forest type in which spruce and pine grow tightly packed, with vertical trunks creating an interior architecture distinct from the cultivated specimens of Japanese garden design. Drypoint suits this subject: the burr that the needle throws up along each scratched line carries additional ink, producing the deep tonal blacks needed to render forest interior shadow, the moist gleam of trunk bark, and the layered recession of trees behind trees. The print sits at a conceptual hinge of Ito's practice, where Japanese pictorial concerns (the pine as subject, the contemplative landscape) meet a Nordic body of subject matter encountered firsthand. Metsä 1 thus marks one of the earliest plates in her sustained interest in the trees of Finland.