Cosmos - Scene A-23

"Cosmos - Scene A-23" belongs to Tachibana's continuing meditation on botanical and celestial form, the title carrying the deliberate double reading the artist favors: the cosmos flower (Cosmos bipinnatus) and the wider cosmic field that her branching, particulate compositions evoke. Worked as an intaglio etching, the print likely combines hard-ground line for the spare linear armature with aquatint passages providing soft tonal grounds — a method that lets her register the kind of quiet, scientific observation that characterizes the broader series. Despite the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) tagging, the work sits within Western contemporary abstraction, drawing the visual economy of Japanese print tradition into a gestural, near-diagrammatic register. The Scene A- sequence signals serial variation within a defined visual problem, a working method consistent with her long-running Michi series. Tachibana, who has produced editions from the San Francisco Bay Area since 1993, treats serial etchings as iterative meditations rather than discrete statements, with each scene refining a shared compositional vocabulary.