Where I Am — composition 8

The closing plate of the 2023 series gathers the cycle's terms — soft-ground's textured line, aquatint's modulated tonal grounds, the dining room's fixed architecture — into a final variation. In intaglio practice, working a series of plates of the same dimension and method establishes a controlled set of conditions within which small differences become legible; Ogura uses this discipline to produce a sequence where the room is continually re-encountered rather than narratively advanced. The result is less a story than a sustained looking, indebted to her Kyoto University of Art and Design training in Western Painting and to a pictorial tradition older than the etching needle that values the quiet meditation on ordinary objects. As a coda, the print holds the series' focus on the place where the artist is — not symbolically, but materially, as a recorded room.