Ritual

This 2017 etching and aquatint draws on Imazu's recurring interest in folkloric ceremony staged at the scale of insects, small mammals, and household objects. Her work frequently borrows the procession-and-gathering structures of Japanese folk tale and Edo-period illustrated zoology, recast among the bugs and weeds of contemporary Australian gardens. Whatever the specific scene — a circle of beetles, a gathering of moths, a small mammal engaged in some apparently purposeful task — the print would have been built up through hard-ground etching for figured outlines and aquatint for the tonal ground, the latter typically bitten in stages to produce the velvety blacks and graduated mid-tones characteristic of her plates. Made the same year as the Great Piece of Turf series, Ritual sits within a body of work that resists narrative explanation in favour of suggestion: small animals and objects engaged in something unmistakably purposeful, the viewer left to read the iconography against a Japanese folk-tale register that the title quietly invokes.