Biography
Niamh Flanagan is an Irish fine-art printmaker working from her Dublin studio across etching, monoprint, collage, and mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing). She graduated from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin, in 2002 with First Class Honours in Fine Art Print, and is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin, where she works as a master printer and programme coordinator.
Her practice explores themes of escape, loneliness, and the search for utopias and space in an ever-connected world, drawing on urban and rural, internal and external landscapes to describe a search for something that may be unattainable. More recently she has added mokuhanga to her repertoire — a portable, water-based woodblock technique she can carry with her wherever she travels, extending the same vocabulary of place and displacement into paper and pigment.
Flanagan's mokuhanga 'whispering from another shore' was selected for Kanreki, the exhibition mounted by Graphic Studio Dublin to mark its 60th anniversary, for which all participating artists were asked to incorporate the colour red. The exhibition was shown at the Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin (29 May – 19 June 2021). Earlier, her solo show 'Dwellings of Mind and Space' (The Printmakers Gallery, Dublin, 2007) introduced the dwellings vocabulary that would carry forward through her later 'Liberitas Urbis,' 'We leave tonight' beach-huts series, and 'Looking Out' work.
She has received Arts Council Mentorship Scheme support, an Arts Council Travel and Training Award, and a Culture Ireland grant. Residencies include the Cill Rialaig Project (Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry), the Lindart International Artists' Colony (Lendava, Slovenia), Na Granicy | Where Borders Meet (Gorlice, Poland), and Edinburgh Printmakers (Scotland). Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, in Stockholm, in Lithuania, and in Japan (Kyoto and Tokyo). In 2013 she co-founded the Mobile Print Project with artist Clare Henderson, a touring printmaking-education initiative in Ireland.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇮🇪Ireland
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
Frequently Asked Questions
Niamh Flanagan is an Irish fine-art printmaker working from her Dublin studio across etching, monoprint, collage, and mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing). She graduated from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin, in 2002 with First Class Honours in Fine Art Print, and is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin, where she works as a master printer and programme coordinator.
Niamh Flanagan'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.