Matataku (Twinkling)

The verb matataku — to blink, to twinkle, to flicker — points to the phenomenon of intermittent light, whether of stars, of lamps, or of the eye itself. As a single-plate viscosity intaglio, the print is well suited to this subject: small dots and discrete bright passages can be reserved on the plate and inked at different viscosities than their surrounding fields, so that points of color sit on or within darker beds in a single press pull rather than being registered separately across multiple plates. Ogawa's plate would typically combine aquatint for tonal grounds, etched or drypoint marks for graphic incident, and surface rolls of contrasting viscosity for the chromatic figure-ground reversals that twinkling implies. By 2008 she had been working in this single-plate viscosity vocabulary for roughly a decade, and Matataku belongs to the mature phase in which small everyday optical events — a flicker, a blink — are treated as sufficient subjects for the patient layering her process requires.