Naoko 1 (Untitled)

Medium:: Lithograph (lithographic-crayon-blackened stone with razor-blade figure extraction)
Image courtesy of: Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop / Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (artist profile)

Description

Naoko 1 (Untitled) is a lithograph in which a figure named or remembered as Naoko emerges from a fully darkened ground. Simonova's subtractive method begins with covering the lithographic stone in lithographic crayon, building a uniform black field, then extracts the figure by scraping back to the bare matrix with a razor blade. The result reverses the conventional direction of drawing — light is taken away rather than added — so that the figure exists as the trace of what has been removed. Within Simonova's wider practice, which centers on memory, recording, repetition, and erasure, this reductive procedure makes the act of remembering visible as a physical operation. Marked '1,' the print also functions as the first instance of an iterated subject; pairing it with Naoko 2 introduces the seriality that runs through her drawings and editioned work, where a single figure is revisited across passes rather than fixed in a definitive image.