Cosmos - Scene A-3

"Cosmos - Scene A-3" sits near the opening of Tachibana's 2023 Cosmos A-sequence, an early statement in a serial body whose individual prints rework a shared compositional logic across many variations. The Cosmos title is characteristic of the artist's interest in held tensions between botanical and celestial readings — between the cosmos flower (Cosmos bipinnatus) and the wider field of dispersed, particulate matter that her work has long described. Executed as an etching, the print would have been worked from a copper or zinc plate using hard-ground line and, in all likelihood, aquatint tonal areas, the technical combination Tachibana has favored throughout her mature practice. While tagged within the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) lineage, the work belongs more accurately to the cross-cultural abstraction that has characterized her studio output since the 1990s. Tachibana, who has worked from the San Francisco Bay Area since 1993, treats sequences such as this one as iterative meditations rather than discrete statements.