The Path

The Path (とおりみち) takes as its subject a route or passageway — the Japanese title carrying the sense of a way one travels through rather than a destination. Working in her characteristic hybrid technique, Kashiwagi combines hand-carved relief blocks with laser-engraved surfaces, producing two distinct registers of mark within a single print: the slightly irregular cut of the gouge against the geometric precision of the laser-burned line. In a transportation subject, this duality lends itself to articulating the contrast between organic terrain and constructed infrastructure — the road traversing a wooded slope, or rail and pavement cutting through field. Compositionally, prints in this mode typically flatten depth in the manner inherited from earlier Japanese woodblock practice, with the path itself functioning as the principal directional vector across the sheet rather than as illusionistic recession. The work belongs to the body of prints Kashiwagi has developed since her studies at Musashino Art University under Ikeda Ryōji, in which the disciplines of traditional moku-hanga carving meet the photographic and digital processes that define her teacher's lineage of postwar Japanese printmaking.