beating of copper - 079

An early entry in Ikeda's ongoing "Beating of Copper" series, this 2019 drypoint demonstrates the foundational vocabulary of his intaglio practice. Drypoint's defining characteristic—the burr raised by a hard needle driven directly across an ungrounded copper plate—produces the soft, velvety line quality visible throughout the series. The title references the physical labor of mark-making itself: each composition emerges through the accumulation of individually engraved strokes, the plate's surface treated as a field of compressed gesture. Number 079 occupies a transitional point in the series' development, where Ikeda's handling of tonal density through cross-hatching and directional mark clusters had solidified into a consistent method. Inked and printed on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi), the burr retains ink generously, giving shadows a characteristic depth that distinguishes drypoint from etching or engraving. The work belongs to a sustained investigation into the phenomenology of the engraved mark rather than representation of external subject matter.