Yoko Akino

Yoko Akino is a Kyoto-born, Ireland-based printmaker who has been a member of Graphic Studio Dublin since 1996. She trained in drawing in Japan and worked as a draughtsperson in Tokyo before her interest in crisp, precise line led her to etching. In 1996 she moved to Ireland and joined Graphic Studio Dublin — Ireland's longest-established artist-run open-access print workshop — where she has worked ever since, building her career around copper-plate etching and aquatint enriched with applied gold leaf, silver leaf, and palladium.

Akino lives on the Cooley Peninsula by Carlingford Lough in County Louth, and its landscape has become one of the recurring subjects of her work. Her imagery moves between Irish topography, Japanese visual and literary references, and a more conceptual register that draws on Buddhist sayings, classical literature, and Yeatsian and Joycean phrases.

Her technique is consistent and identifying: small to medium-format copper plates, etched line on an aquatinted ground, frequently overlaid with gold leaf, silver leaf, or palladium that catches the light against the matte ink. The luxurious surface, combined with intimate composition, produces a still, slow-moving visual register that bridges Western intaglio with a Japanese material sensibility. She has also produced mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodcut) sheets, including "Between Heaven and Earth" and "The Heart of the Matter."

Akino is widely recognised as one of Ireland's leading contemporary printmakers; her work is held in numerous private and public collections, and she was awarded the O'Sullivan Graphic Supplies prize for Best Print at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition in 2007. A long-standing member of Graphic Studio Dublin, she has shown in successive Graphic Studio Gallery exhibitions, including "When We Believe," and in "Between Islands," the joint exhibition with Glasgow Print Studio. Her work is also represented through SO Fine Art Editions in Dublin and Glasgow Print Studio, and she shows with Graphic Studio Gallery during Dublin Gallery Weekend.

Over a career of some three decades she has produced a substantial body of intaglio work, and she remains one of the most visible Japanese-born printmakers working in Ireland. Her sustained commitment to copper-plate intaglio with applied precious-metal leaf has produced a body of work that operates fluently between the Irish landscape tradition and a contemplative contemporary East Asian register.