before dawn

A medium-format vertical etching (65 × 47 cm) from 2023, exhibited at the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025. The title evokes the liminal interval before sunrise — that quiet stretch when night has not yet released its hold and the first cool gradations of light begin to register at the horizon. In intaglio at this scale, such a subject typically calls for sustained tonal modulation across the plate: aquatint passages worked through successive stopped-out stages to graduate luminosity, often combined with hard-ground line work to articulate landscape silhouettes against the lightening sky. The vertical format invites a stacked compositional reading — a foreground anchor, a quiet middle ground, and a sky occupying the upper register. Muto, a member of the Nihon Hanga Kyokai and a student of Tomoko Baba, works within a contemporary Japanese intaglio idiom that privileges atmosphere and contemplative silence over narrative incident. 'before dawn' locates its content in the threshold quality of light itself rather than in any depicted event, characteristic of her wider practice in etching.