Mokomoko

The Japanese onomatopoeia mokomoko denotes fluffiness or puffiness and is also the name of a formless fur-creature in yokai lore. The title fits Imazu's recurring interest in small Japanese folkloric figures rendered with quiet humour. Made in offset lithography rather than her customary intaglio, the print would have been drawn on plate or transferred from a hand-drawn original, the offset process carrying the line and any tonal areas across to the printing surface. Offset lithography accommodates softer line and broader flat colour areas than her etchings, giving the medium a different graphic register suited to character-based work. Within Imazu's body of work, Mokomoko is among her legibly playful pieces: an indistinct fluffy creature aligned with the small mammals, ghosts, and household-scale yokai that populate her catalogue. The 2014 date places it before the sustained intaglio botanical and seascape works of 2015–2017, in a period when Imazu was working across several print disciplines in parallel.