Tomoko Takeda is a Japanese printmaker based in New York. Her work explores materiality, rhythm, and narrative through hand-pulled processes including lithography, mezzotint, linocut, and embossing. She worked as a graphic designer in Tokyo before pursuing a career as a professional chef, where engagement with physical materials and repetition shaped her sensitivity to process and transformation. In 2019, she moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. Her practice draws on natural forms, cultural memory, and storytelling, creating layered images where abstraction and narrative coexist.

My work explores human potential through physical, process-based printmaking. Using lithography, mezzotint, and linocut, I engage repetition, layering, and time as central elements. Through these actions, conscious control recedes and decisions shaped by bodily rhythm emerge. The resulting images hold traces of touch, pressure, and accumulated process, existing prior to fixed meaning and inviting intuitive experience. I am interested in how material resistance and physical engagement generate sensory knowledge. I sometimes incorporate embossing and subtle surface shifts, and at times geometric structures and gold appear to emphasize traces and intensify the presence of action over time.