Kitchen File

The title evokes a filing or cataloguing of kitchen objects — utensils, ingredients, vessels — perhaps arranged in a grid or inventoried sequence on the plate. Etching carries the linear precision needed for the silhouettes of pots, knives, ladles, and graters; aquatint supplies the tonal grounds against which these objects are pinned; and collagraph permits the introduction of physical kitchen textures (gauze, mesh, wood grain) directly onto the plate's surface. Tagged Daily Life, the work belongs squarely to Maeda's central preoccupation: the kitchen as the room in which the labor of feeding others most concentratedly occurs, and therefore the room in which her thesis — that ordinary domestic acts carry the weight of life and death — is most legible. The "file" framing suggests an attempt to fix and account for this labor, to render it visible as an organized body of evidence rather than allow it to disappear into routine.