Cosmos - Scene A-16

A 2023 etching from Tachibana's ongoing Cosmos sequence, Scene A-16 takes the cosmos flower (Cosmos bipinnatus) as its botanical subject, rendered in the artist's characteristic vocabulary of finely bitten line and tonal aquatint. Tachibana approaches the bloom less as a portrait of a single flower than as a study in branching structure — the radial petal arrangement and feathery foliage translated into a network of marks that hover between scientific diagram and abstract pattern. The Cosmos series extends Tachibana's long-standing interest in the visual logic of plant growth that runs through her Michi (Path / Life) prints, transposed here onto a different botanical model. While the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) tradition of Edo-era woodblock provides a distant reference point, the actual idiom is that of contemporary intaglio: copperplate etching, layered tones, and the slow accumulation of detail typical of the San Francisco Bay Area printmaking studios where Tachibana has worked since 1993.