Between Acts

The theatrical title points to a liminal moment — the pause between scenes, neither one thing nor the next. Akino's intaglio practice, with its layering of bitten line and aquatint tone, lends itself to this kind of in-between register: subjects suggested rather than declared, weather and light rather than fixed event. The 2022 print is worked without applied leaf, the aquatint carrying the atmospheric weight alone. Akino has worked across her career between two visual cultures — the moku-hanga tradition familiar from her Kyoto training and the European intaglio tradition she joined when she became a member of Graphic Studio Dublin in 1996 — and "Between Acts" can be read in that biographical register as well as in its theatrical one. The print belongs to a group of 2022 works in which short, suggestive titles do as much pictorial work as the image itself.