Playing Mantis

A second mantis composition from the same year as Mantis Goes, this print emphasizes motion or interaction — the title implies the insect at activity rather than at rest, perhaps in the courtship or hunting posture for which mantises are observed. Hiroshima draws the figure into the plate through cumulative burnishing of an evenly rocked ground, allowing the carapace's segmented architecture and the long forelegs to emerge from black as graduated greys. The mezzotint medium gives the insect a sculptural rather than diagrammatic presence; rather than the flat outline of a kacho-e woodblock, the mantis here has the modeled volume of a creature caught under low lateral light. The pairing of two mantis prints in 2011 indicates a sustained working campaign on the subject, of a kind common in Hiroshima's practice, where particular fauna are explored across multiple plates rather than treated as one-off images.