Biography
Kari Cahill is an Irish artist, pigment maker, mokuhanga printmaker, and curator whose practice contributes to new perspectives on cultural, historical, and natural landscape through engagement with natural materials. Based at The Model, Sligo, on Ireland's north-west coast, she is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin and a featured artist on the Wild Pigment Project, an artist-based resource for practitioners working with natural pigments.
Cahill studied Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin, where she co-founded and directed Basic Space (2011-2014), a not-for-profit artist-led contemporary art space in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Dublin 8 that subsequently moved to Marrowbone Lane as part of the Arts Council of Ireland's Vacant Spaces Initiative. After NCAD she moved her practice to the west of Ireland, joining The Model in Sligo as a studio artist, and is the co-director and co-founder of Lay of the Land (LOTL), a site-responsive arts organisation producing residencies and public-art exhibitions in wild locations around Ireland.
Her mokuhanga 'once floating now knowing' (2020, 34 × 26 cm, edition of 10) was selected for the Kanreki exhibition mounted by Graphic Studio Dublin to mark its 60th anniversary, the cohort organised around a brief that all participating artists incorporate the colour red. The work was shown at The Model, Sligo (2020), Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin (April 2021), and travelled to the satellite events of the 9th International Mokuhanga Conference at Nara Prefectural Cultural Hall (November-December 2021). Her mokuhanga vocabulary draws on the same body of natural-pigment research that drives her broader practice, situating mokuhanga within a wider concern for the geological and biological materiality of place.
The slug 'kari-cahill' identifies the verified Sligo-based working mokuhanga printmaker, distinct from any other persons named Kari Cahill in unrelated industries. Within the Hanga roster she is part of the 2020-21 Kanreki cohort whose mokuhanga selections produced the most extensively documented contemporary Irish mokuhanga publication of the past decade.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇮🇪Ireland
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Kari Cahill is an Irish artist, pigment maker, mokuhanga printmaker, and curator whose practice contributes to new perspectives on cultural, historical, and natural landscape through engagement with natural materials. Based at The Model, Sligo, on Ireland's north-west coast, she is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin and a featured artist on the Wild Pigment Project, an artist-based resource for practitioners working with natural pigments.
Kari Cahill's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.