Cosmos - Scene A-1

Scene A-1 opens Tachibana's 2023 Cosmos sequence, an extended set of etchings in which a single botanical motif — likely the cosmos blossom from which the series takes its title — is organized into discrete numbered scenes. The Birds & Flowers tag aligns the work with kacho-e by subject lineage, though the visual idiom is abstract and contemporary rather than traditional. As the first print in the sequence, A-1 establishes the compositional vocabulary that subsequent scenes vary: spare botanical line, soft aquatint passages, and the surrounding paper treated as active negative space. Tachibana's etchings often combine these intaglio techniques with chine-collé tissue inserts, which allow a botanical form to float against a shifted ground. The Cosmos framing reads simultaneously as botanical (the flower) and cosmological (the universe), a doubled meaning that places this body of work alongside her long-running Michi (Path / Life) series.