Awakening of the Péist

The péist is a serpent of Irish folklore said to inhabit the country's loughs and rivers, including Carlingford Lough on the Cooley Peninsula where Akino has lived since the mid-1990s. The print works in etched line over aquatint, the bitten tonalities giving a soft, water-darkened atmosphere from which the creature appears to be emerging. Akino's practice at Graphic Studio Dublin has long combined Irish topographic and folkloric subjects with the compositional habits of her early Kyoto training in printmaking, and the péist sits squarely in that overlap — an Irish water-spirit treated with the suggestive economy of a Japanese yōkai image. The 2022 date places it within a body of intaglio work in which Akino has returned repeatedly to the lough and its surrounding hills, drawing local mythology into the same visual register as the headlands.