Abyss of the Forest

The title, 森の深淵, points to the recessed, light-starved depth of a woodland interior — likely a tightly framed view of trunks and undergrowth in which the eye is drawn into a darker pocket at center or rear. The image relies on the full tonal range an etched and aquatinted copperplate can hold: a bitten line for trunk edges and bark, repeated stop-out across multiple aquatint bites for layered dark-to-darker recession, and a fine plate tone wiped to keep the highlights from going chalky. Chine-collé under the plate lets the deepest blacks gain density without flattening, the thinner Asian sheet absorbing ink that would sit slick on Western paper. The work belongs to a recurring strand in Takeda's output since the 2000s in which forests are treated less as scenery than as inhabited interiors — sometimes holding the half-seen face of a woman, sometimes empty. Her forest prints typically suppress scale cues, omitting horizon and figure, so the viewer reads them at the depth the title proposes rather than the dimension of the plate. The 2019 date places this in her late mature period.