Akiko Takizawa, Headland #1, 2007, gelatin silver print © Akiko Takizawa

Over the Parched Field is an exhibition placed in-between the disciplines of photography and printmaking. Akiko Takizawa (b. 1971) is a London-based Japanese artist and a graduate of the MA Printmaking course from the Royal College of Art in 2006. The subject matter of her first solo exhibition is firmly placed in Japanese culture, and the artworks in the exhibition include collotypes, gelatin silver prints and lithographs. Although the works are selected from various series over the past five years, and produced by using different techniques, the exhibition is coherent thanks to the artist’s strong point of view.

The most recent works in the exhibition are from 2011, titled Osorezan and Goshogawara. Both series draw inspiration from the Aomori region in the Northern tip of Japanese mainland and are produced by using collotype. Goshogawara is a series of indoor imagery: delicately lit rooms echo tension between absence and presence, showing a shrine of expectant dolls and a pair of shoes waiting for their owner. Osorezan series is photographed in the volcanic mountains of Osorezan in Aomori. According to traditional beliefs, the mountains are where dead souls live on in the afterlife, and it is where people go to commune with their deceased relatives. This blurring between the living and the dead is successfully communicated in the pictures, where the concept of a spiritual “no-man’s-land” is captured in warm tonal greys and silhouetted in ominous shadows. The quality of the collotype printing adds to the sense that the subject matter is time-worn, traditional and about to disappear. The collotype technique was in use from the 1860s onwards, but soon fell out of favour thanks to the emergence of other, less time-consuming photography methods. It is a photomechanical printing process which creates an accurate reproduction and quality of detail. Collotypes have an element of printmaking about them, as they are produced through a plate-printing process. The printing and the quality of the paper – the collotypes are printed on Washi, traditional Japanese paper, by long-standing printers in Kyoto – give Takizawa’s images a sense of history and timelessness.

The Japanese landscape is a recurring element in many of Takizawa’s works. Her images, such as the mountainous silhouettes of the Osorezan series, explore man’s relationship with nature, and how deeply physical environment shapes culture, identity and traditions. The series Where We Belong combines portraits of Takizawa’s family with ethereal clouds and snow, and creates ghostly impressions, further suggesting the artist’s interest in the otherworldly. Takizawa’s works have a certain sense of loss and longing, perhaps implying the artist’s own sense of displacement and separation from her homeland.

Photography and printmaking could be described as sister techniques and this show certainly demonstrates the close links between the two imagemaking methods. Takizawa’s use of an older technique such as collotype is an encouraging sign of the preservation of and interest in traditional processes. It also highlights how much the imagemaking method can add to the visual message and the interpretation of the subject matter of the work. Takizawa demonstrates eloquently that the technique is the voice of what is being said.