Japanese micro-season: Chō hajimete shōzu (蝶始生)

Meaning: Butterflies begin to appear

This micro season celebrates the first butterflies emerging into the warming air of late spring. It signals a moment of renewal when the landscape begins to feel animated after winter.

Rigden interprets this moment through sweeping gestures and light tonal movement across the canvas. Colour drifts and disperses, echoing the delicate flight of butterflies carried on a soft spring breeze.

Imogen Rigden’s exhibition Micro Season takes inspiration from the traditional Japanese calendar of seventy two micro seasons, known as Shichijūni kō (七十二候). Rather than dividing the year into four broad seasons, this ancient system breaks the natural cycle into subtle seasonal moments lasting only a few days.

Each micro season observes a small shift in the natural world. Ice begins to form on streams, butterflies appear in the spring air, or insects retreat underground as autumn approaches.

Rigden adopts this poetic framework as a way of observing the landscapes of northern Europe. Working with water soluble oils, she builds layered paintings that evoke atmosphere, movement and memory rather than literal description. Her works translate fleeting environmental changes into colour, texture and gesture.

Together the paintings form a quiet meditation on time, landscape and the subtle rhythms that shape the natural world.