Magical Dandelion

A single dandelion is an unassuming subject in the contemporary printmaking repertoire, and Magical Dandelion makes that ordinariness its occasion. The dandelion — Taraxacum, an introduced weed across Australia — fits within Imazu's catalogue of tiny neighbours, the roadside flora and garden margins she returns to repeatedly. As an etching with aquatint, the print would carry the plant's silhouette in fine etched line, with the aquatint laying in tonal background fields and the seed-head's diaphanous structure either reserved through stop-out or worked with a softer aquatint grain. The magical framing in the title gestures toward the Japanese folk-tale register she frequently brings to humble Australian flora, the kind of attention that treats a weed in a verge as a creature with its own quiet agency. The print precedes the 2017 Great Piece of Turf homage and shares its ground-level botanical attention, indebted to natural-history illustration as much as to fine-art printmaking traditions.