Donn's Garden

Donn is the Irish god of the dead in pre-Christian tradition; Tech Duinn, the House of Donn, is a rocky islet off the south-west coast of Ireland to which souls were said to gather before passing on. A garden reading of this site is unexpected — implying the etched plate transforms a barren Atlantic outcrop into a contemplative or cultivated space. Working on copper, Akino builds the topography through bitten line and selective burnishing to produce the variegated greys and blacks of weathered rock and sea light. The print sits within her ongoing engagement with Irish coastal topography, a body of work that includes Errigal, Slieve Foye, Cliara, Scariff and Deenish, and the Dursey Island view. As a Kyoto-trained printmaker resident on the Cooley Peninsula since the mid-1990s, Akino reads these places through a layered visual sensibility — neither documentary nor purely Japonist, but mediated by long looking. The 2024 print continues her habit of giving named, mythologically charged Irish sites their own intaglio portrait.