In Our Soil Bed

A pure etching, made by drawing through a wax-coated copper or zinc plate with a fine needle and immersing the plate in acid; the acid bites the exposed metal to produce recessed lines that hold ink under press pressure. The resulting image is built from line whose weight and density depend on bite time, which etchers control by stopping out areas progressively across multiple acid baths. The title gathers several registers — agricultural, domestic, intimate — and Soil Bed reads simultaneously as a planting bed and as a bed of earth shared by a pair, an ambiguity consistent with May's interest in dissolving the lines between domestic space and the body. Within her 2025 etchings, this print sits alongside Give the Dirt a Little Room and other earth-referenced works, suggesting a thematic cluster that treats soil as a site of growth, decay, and shared inhabitation rather than as background. The medium's ability to render fine root-like and grass-like marks makes it well-suited to imagery drawn from the ground.