Moya Bligh

Moya Bligh (1954, Kilkenny — 2009, Kyoto) was an Irish printmaker whose roughly three-decade residency in Kyoto and her teaching practice across Ireland, Japan, the United States, and Scotland made her a key conduit through which mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing) entered the Irish print scene.

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. She first travelled to Japan in 1976 and, supported by a Japanese ministry of education scholarship, studied mokuhanga at Tama Art University in the Tokyo region, where she completed her MFA. In the early 1980s she moved permanently to Kyoto, where she would spend most of the rest of her life.

In the late 1980s she studied with 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. Her print imagery is often abstract, organic, and concerned with the surface, texture, and grain of the printed wood itself; series such as Beyond Wood and Hibiki (Resonance) foreground the woodblock surface as a co-author of the image.

Bligh taught mokuhanga at Kyoto Seika University, where she regularly conducted woodblock and papermaking courses. Through the 1990s and 2000s she also led intensive workshops at Graphic Studio Dublin, the print department at the University of Oregon (Eugene), and the Glasgow School of Art — workshops that introduced mokuhanga to Irish, Scottish, and American printmakers. She is credited with introducing mokuhanga to Graphic Studio Dublin in the 1980s, seeding a practice the studio has carried on since.

Her works are held in the Butler Gallery (Kilkenny) collection, the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, the President of Ireland's collection at Áras an Uachtaráin, and other Irish public collections. Documented works in the Butler Gallery collection 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 years before her death she remained active in Ireland–Japan exchange, organising exchange exhibitions between Japanese and Irish artists.

Following her death in Kyoto in 2009, Graphic Studio Gallery mounted 'A Tribute to Moya Bligh' (January 2010) to acknowledge her role in the Irish print community. The studio's later 'Kanreki' exhibition, marking the 60th anniversary of Graphic Studio Dublin and curated by Kate MacDonagh, gathered mokuhanga prints by members and invited artists including Bligh, Yoko Akino, and Cliona Doyle — a reflection of the durable mokuhanga practice her teaching helped establish in Ireland.