Alison No. 2

Via Intaglio print, Japanese artist Sakura wrests for portraits that combine a strange and shaded fantasy with adroit technical skill. “Alison 2”s human physiognomy is countered by an overall fruit-like appearance, creating a vying of familiar and surreal that gives the work a mysterious and dark underpinning. Sakura inserts a dramatic level of textural detail into the grain of the flesh and leaves through a painstaking process of thin scratches with a needle into the copper printing plate, the process inducing a state of deep, vague and meditative thought which often transitions into the realisation of the result.