Where I Am — composition 1

The opening plate of the eight-part 2023 series situates the viewer within the dining room that has long served as Ogura's primary subject. The soft-ground etching transfers the grain and weave of pressed materials directly onto the plate, lending the line a granular hesitation that contrasts with the broader tonal fields built up through aquatint. Working from a fixed domestic vantage, Ogura treats the room as a stage for an interior monologue: the table, the chair, and the ambient light become surrogates for presence rather than ornamental still-life elements. The print reads as a quiet establishing shot for the cycle that follows — a calibration of distance between the artist and the room she has chosen to depict repeatedly. Trained in Western-style painting at Kyoto University of Art and Design, Ogura inflects this European-derived technique with a sensibility shaped by Japanese pictorial conventions of compressed space and contemplative attention to ordinary objects.