Cats 3

Cats 3 is the third print in Miyake's 2012 Cats series, produced through her photogram method: a drawing on transparent acetate is exposed against gelatin silver paper, with the photographic source reversed so the positive becomes a negative. The series takes the domestic cat as its subject — a recurring motif in Japanese visual culture from Edo-period ukiyo-e onward, including works by Kuniyoshi and Hiroshige — but Miyake's treatment removes the animal from the painted or block-printed tradition and into the darkroom. The cat appears as luminous linework on a dark field, the gelatin silver paper carrying the deep blacks and silvery midtones of darkroom photography while the line retains the tentative quality of a drawing. Made the same year as Something Hidden in A, Cats 3 belongs to an early phase of Miyake's photogram practice in which she tested the procedure across different subjects — figures, animals, ambient scenes — before the Missing Shade series of 2015 consolidated the project under a single conceptual frame. The work extends print tradition in the literal sense: paper exposed to a matrix to produce a multiple.