Late Evening on the Royal Canal 1

The Royal Canal runs 146 km from Dublin to the River Shannon, threading through the Irish midlands O'Reilly knows from her childhood in County Westmeath. Late Evening on the Royal Canal 1 belongs to a sequence in which she applies mokuhanga's water-based methods — registration via kentō marks, pigment brushed onto the block with nori paste, hand-burnishing with a baren on dampened washi — to Irish waterscapes. The technique's affinity for atmospheric tonal washes suits the long blue hour over still canal water, where reflected sky doubles the horizon. Bokashi gradations along the bank or sky are typical of her treatment of fading light, contrasting with the discrete blocks of colour that define reeds, hedgerow, or towpath. The work extends a thread running through O'Reilly's wider practice — the Irish landscape as a record of human movement and labour, here an engineered eighteenth-century cargo route that once carried emigrants toward Dublin's docks — rendered through a medium she has pursued alongside her etching and lithography at Graphic Studio Dublin.