Elke Thönnes

Elke Thönnes is a German-born Irish printmaker primarily working in mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing) and photo-etching, based at Graphic Studio Dublin. Born in 1960 in Germany, she trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel before relocating to Ireland and completing her formal education with a graduating year of 1991 from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Thönnes has made Ireland her permanent residence and creative base, with her Graphic Studio Dublin practice the principal site of her print output. Her work is held by Ireland's Office of Public Works, Queens University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, and Dublin City University, and a recent commission produced photo-etchings for the Davenport Hotel, Dublin.

Her mokuhanga practice draws on extended observation of the Irish landscape — particularly the Atlantic coast and West Cork — translated into water-based woodblock prints with the dexterous and sensitive handling characteristic of the medium. She describes her travels across Ireland as a continuous quest to find her place on its map, a biographical thread that links her German-Irish identity to a methodical, exploratory, place-based practice. Water is a recurrent subject; her studies of the Atlantic coast extend the mokuhanga vocabulary of fluid, gradient-based bokashi colour passages into the specific colour register of West-Cork and West-Irish coastal landscape.

Thönnes was part of the 'Borderless' collaborative project produced during the 2019 MI-LAB Artist-in-Residence Program at Lake Kawaguchi, Japan — the artist's-book edition of eight sumi-ink mokuhanga prints in scroll form, made with co-residents from the USA, Ireland, Korea, and the UK and addressing the political theme of separation. Her Kanreki contribution 'Bitter Roots' was selected for the Graphic Studio Dublin 60th-anniversary mokuhanga exhibition shown at The Model, Sligo (2020), Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin (April 2021), and the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference satellite event at Nara Prefectural Cultural Hall (November-December 2021). The Kanreki cohort's brief — that all participating artists incorporate red — placed Thönnes alongside fellow Graphic Studio mokuhanga artists Robert Russell, Geraldine O'Reilly, Kate MacDonagh, Mateja Šmic, and Vaida Varnagienė, plus invited Japan-based artists Yoko Akino and Katsutoshi Yuasa.

For Hanga's purposes, Thönnes qualifies as a senior European mokuhanga practitioner with German-Irish biographical positioning, established institutional collections, MI-LAB residency credentials, and Kanreki-cohort selection. Her practice exemplifies the Graphic Studio Dublin model of dual-language printmaking — Western intaglio (etching, photo-etching) running alongside Japanese mokuhanga — that has emerged as a defining feature of contemporary Irish print since 2010.