Lotus

A single lotus blossom occupies the sheet, presented in the frontal, vertical orientation Tokitoh favours for her flower portraits. The lotus in Buddhist and broader East Asian iconography carries associations of purity and emergence from water, but her treatment is descriptive rather than emblematic: the petals are observed as overlapping volumes, and the seed pod at the centre reads as a pale disc rendered through fewer pigment layers than the surrounding bloom. The print exemplifies her layered-translucency method, in which approximately ten squeegee pulls deposit successive veils of grey, blue, and pale green pigment, building a watercolour-like depth that no single pass could produce. The petals' soft internal modeling—the gradient from base to tip, the suggestion of curvature along each petal's outer edge—is achieved through this accumulation rather than through linework. Within her wider body of work, "Lotus" sits among the lotus subjects she has returned to repeatedly, each iteration redrawn directly onto a fresh silkscreen rather than printed from a stored matrix.