Errigal

Errigal is a 751-metre quartzite cone in northwest Donegal, Ireland's most identifiable mountain profile and one of the recurring landscape subjects in Akino's work — explicitly named alongside Slieve Foye, Donn's Garden, Cliara, and the Dursey Island view among her Irish topographic motifs. The print combines aquatint and etching with palladium leaf, the leaf likely standing in for the pale quartzite scree that gives Errigal its distinctive whitish appearance against the surrounding bog. Palladium reads as a cooler grey-silver than gold and does not tarnish, suiting the cold-light quality of the Donegal subject. The combination of intaglio tonalities and applied metal leaf is Akino's recognisable technical signature, developed across her years at Graphic Studio Dublin; the Errigal print belongs to her sustained, unsentimental treatment of Irish landscape from the perspective of a Kyoto-trained printmaker who has lived and worked in Ireland since the mid-1990s.