Cosmos - Scene A-21

The twenty-first plate in the 2023 Cosmos sequence, this etching extends Tachibana's serial study of the cosmos flower. The botanical subject is treated with the spare frontality that characterizes the artist's mature work: a single radial bloom, its eight petals and feathery foliage rendered in bitten line and aquatint, set against an open ground. Tachibana frequently combines etching with chine-collé in her editions, and the Cosmos prints participate in the broader interest in layered paper and tonal subtlety that runs through her Bay Area output. While the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) genre of Edo-period woodblock printmaking sits in the distant background of any modern Japanese flower image, the immediate idiom here is contemporary intaglio. The Cosmos series sits alongside her Michi (Path / Life) editions as part of a long meditative practice in which botanical structure is treated as the organizing principle rather than the decorative one.