Cat Town

Cat Town likely takes its title from Hagiwara Sakutaro's 1935 short story Nekomachi — a hallucinatory account of a town discovered to be populated by cats — though the print stands independently as an urban scene. Tagged as both urban and cat-themed, the etching and aquatint would carry the architectural lines of streets, rooflines, and lamp-posts in hard-ground etched line, with aquatint tonal fields giving the night or dusk atmosphere an enveloping quality. Cats, presumably, occupy the streets, doorways, and rooftops in numbers that tip the scene from naturalism into the folk-tale register Imazu frequently invokes. The 2013 date situates Cat Town alongside Bakeneko at 2am (2012) in a small cluster of cat-centred plates, both leaning on Japanese literary and folkloric sources rather than purely observational subject matter. Imazu's practice consistently superimposes Japanese narrative material onto Australian or generic urban settings, and Cat Town reads as part of that translation.