Moya Bligh

Moya Bligh (1954, Kilkenny — 2009, Kyoto) was an Irish printmaker whose three-decade residency in Kyoto and her teaching practice across Ireland, Japan, the United States, and Scotland made her the principal conduit through which mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing) entered the Irish print scene. She is regarded as the founding figure of contemporary Irish mokuhanga.

Bligh trained first at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin, where her interest in printmaking was sparked during a study-abroad term in Urbino, Italy. After completing her undergraduate studies in Ireland she moved to Japan in the early 1980s and enrolled at Tama Art University in Tokyo, then continued at the same university to complete her MFA in printmaking. She subsequently relocated permanently to Kyoto, where she would spend the remaining thirty years of her life.

In Kyoto she became a long-term student of the eminent mokuhanga master Akira Kurosaki, and over the following decades she developed a personal idiom rooted in the materiality of cherry-block wood, water-based pigment, washi paper, and the baren — what mokuhanga practitioners call the 'wood-language' of the medium. Her print imagery is often abstract, organic, and concerned with the surface, texture, and grain of the printed wood itself; the most-cited series in her catalogue, Beyond Wood (2000s) and Hibiki (Resonance), foreground the woodblock surface as a co-author of the image.

Bligh held a teaching post at Kyoto Seika University, where she taught mokuhanga to a generation of Japanese and international students. Through the 1990s and 2000s she also conducted intensive workshops at Graphic Studio Dublin, the print department at the University of Oregon (Eugene), and Glasgow School of Art — workshops that introduced mokuhanga to dozens of Irish, Scottish, and American printmakers, including a generation of Graphic Studio Dublin members who later travelled to Japan to deepen their training. Her sustained mediation between the Irish and Japanese print communities is documented in the 'Kanreki: 60 Years of Graphic Studio Dublin' exhibition, where she is acknowledged as the originator of the studio's continuing mokuhanga programme.

Her works are held in the Butler Gallery (Kilkenny) collection, the Office of Public Works (OPW) and the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, the President of Ireland's collection at Áras an Uachtaráin, and in numerous Irish public-building collections. Documented works include Beyond Wood 1 (2002, woodblock on paper, 20 × 35.9 cm, edition 1/10), Hibiki 3 (edition 1/10) and Hibiki 5 in the Butler Gallery collection. She maintained a continuing curatorial relationship with the Japan-Ireland exchange, organising several exchange exhibitions between Japanese and Irish artists in the years preceding her death.

Following her death in Kyoto in 2009, Graphic Studio Gallery mounted 'A Tribute to Moya Bligh' (January 2010) to acknowledge her central role in the Irish print community. The 60th-anniversary 'Kanreki' mokuhanga exhibition (2021) at Graphic Studio Gallery framed her as the founder of the Irish mokuhanga lineage, and the wider Irish print scene's now-substantial cohort of mokuhanga-trained printmakers — Yoko Akino, Susan Early, Cliona Doyle, and others — represents the durable institutional legacy of her teaching.