Water fantasy D

A composition from Iwami's extended engagement with water as both subject and surface. The "D" designation indicates its place within a sequence of related explorations of fluid form, a method she favored over isolated images. The print likely combines deep relief embossing with metallic leaf and translucent pigments, the vocabulary she developed through the 1960s. Iwami pressed her woodblocks into dampened [kozo](/glossary/kozo) paper with sustained [baren](/glossary/baren) pressure, raising the surface into three-dimensional ridges that catch ambient light and shift as the viewer moves. Silver leaf often accompanies these embossed passages, evoking the play of light on water rather than depicting waves directly. The approach severed her practice from both [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition and the conventional [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) ink-on-paper aesthetics that her mentor Koshiro Onchi had pioneered. Water provided Iwami a lasting armature for abstraction, permitting variation while demanding precise registration of multiple blocks against the paper's unstable, dampened surface.