Calcite Island

A 2010 wood engraving made early in Imazu's career — three years after her RMIT printmaking degree — Calcite Island sits among the relief works in her practice. Wood engraving uses end-grain blocks, typically boxwood or lemonwood, cut with burin and graver to produce fine white-line marks against a dense black ground; the medium suits small-scale, tightly worked imagery of the kind Imazu has consistently favoured. The title points toward a geological or imagined-island subject: calcite is the principal mineral of limestone, and an island built of or named for it suggests white cliffs, layered strata, or a self-contained miniature world. Whether the engraving depicts a literal island or a metaphorical one, the white-line technique would render rocks, water, and any inhabitants in a register quite different from her later aquatint-heavy intaglio. As an early piece it predates the tiny-neighbours iconography that crystallises in her subsequent etchings and shows her already working across multiple print disciplines.