Horseshoe Bend

A landscape print depicting a tight river meander where the watercourse loops back on itself, a topographic motif common along Australian rivers such as the Murray. The etched line establishes the curve of the river and the contour of the surrounding hills, with aquatint laying down graduated tonal fields to model water, sandbar, and bushland recession. Horseshoe Bend marks a scalar shift from Imazu's habitual close-focus subjects — the bugs, weeds, and pebbles of suburban Melbourne gardens — toward a wider topographic register. The intaglio process, with its capacity for sustained plate tone and atmospheric tonal banding, lends itself to receding distance in a way her usual close studies do not require. The print sits within a thread of Australian landscape work produced during her residencies at Baldessin Press in the Yarra Valley, where the surrounding bushland has periodically widened her subject matter beyond the garden bed.