Even on the Darkest Days

Dated to the first pandemic year, the title carries the consolatory phrasing common to that period without naming it directly. As a pure etching, the print works through bitten line — and any retained plate tone — rather than through the aquatint fields of much of Akino's other work, giving the image a more linear, drawn quality. The phrase implies a held image of light or constancy against a wider darkness; in a printmaker whose subjects are predominantly the Cooley coast, the Atlantic islands, and Japanese visual reference, this is likely registered as landscape rather than figure. The print belongs to a thread in Akino's work where the title operates as a quiet address — readable as personal, seasonal, or quasi-devotional — and where the etching plate's capacity for fine line carries the weight rather than tonal mass. Made within the intaglio practice at Graphic Studio Dublin, where Akino has been a working studio member since 1996, it is part of a small body of plates produced through the 2020 lockdown period.