Where I Am — composition 9

This 2023 print continues Ogura's ongoing 私の居るところ ('Where I Am') series, in which a small domestic interior — most often the dining room — serves as the recurring subject. Soft-ground etching produces a line that retains the impression of whatever was pressed or drawn through the wax-softened ground, lending object edges a slightly furred, pencil-drawn quality. Aquatint provides the graduated mid-tones, biting the plate in even fields where a resin-dust ground has been laid down. Together the two techniques generate the muted, tonal interior space characteristic of the series: pools of shadow under a table, recessed corners, light caught on a single surface. The numbered titling suggests an open-ended visual diary rather than a finished sequence, and composition 9 sits among adjacent plates as one frame in a sustained act of looking. Trained in Western Painting (Yōga) at Kyoto University of Art and Design, Ogura uses the etcher's intaglio vocabulary to articulate something closer to a Japanese pictorial sensibility — the privacy of the room, the pacing of light, the attention paid to the ordinary.