Somewhere

Somewhere (Dokoka) belongs to Ogawa Chiaki's continuing series of small-to-medium intaglio prints in which place is registered as atmosphere rather than topography. The Japanese title's open pronoun—dokoka, simply 'somewhere'—signals that the image withholds a fixed setting, presenting instead a remembered or imagined location filtered through color. As with most of her output since the early 2000s, the work is a single-plate viscosity print in the Hayter tradition: oil-based inks of contrasting viscosities are applied successively with rollers of varying hardness to a single etched and aquatinted plate, so that pigments of different stiffness occupy the bitten recesses, the surface, and intermediate levels without intermixing. The result is several colors pulled from one impression, layered in a way that approximates Ogawa's often-stated weaving analogy. Compositionally, prints in this group tend toward soft tonal fields broken by clusters of finer aquatint or drypoint incident, the chromatic strata reading as overlapping veils. Within her wider Tokyo-based practice it sits with works that translate transient impressions—sounds, fragments of memory, passing light—into chromatic abstraction rather than explicit depiction.