Cosmos - Scene A-17

Continuing the Cosmos sequence of 2023, Scene A-17 belongs to a serial body of etchings in which Tachibana works through variations on a single botanical motif. Aquatint passages establish soft tonal fields against which the linear armature of the cosmos plant — stems, leaf nodes, the eight-petaled flowerhead — is drawn out in bitten line. The print sits within Tachibana's wider practice of meditative serial imagery, where small differences from one impression to the next register as the visual record of attention rather than as departures in subject matter. Her training as an art educator at Kobe University, followed by her relocation to the Bay Area in 1993, sits behind the work's quiet, didactic clarity: each plate reads almost as a page from a botanical study sequence. The cosmos itself, a Mexican import naturalized in Japanese gardens during the Meiji period, is an apt subject for a printmaker whose career has been organized around the meeting of Japanese aesthetic tradition and Western contemporary abstraction.