Sail On, Silver Moon

The print uses palladium leaf alongside aquatint and etching — Akino's leaf-based technique adapted from gold to a cooler, silver-grey metal that does not tarnish as silver leaf would. The pictorial subject, signalled by the tags Boats & Ships and Moonlight, is a small vessel under a moonlit sky, the palladium standing in for the moon and its reflected light on water. Akino has lived on the Cooley Peninsula by Carlingford Lough since the mid-1990s, and lough and coastal subjects appear repeatedly across her output; here the vocabulary reads less as a specific local view than as a generalised nocturne in the manner of meisho-e night scenes. The combination of palladium leaf with aquatint tonalities gives Akino a controlled metallic luminescence against soft bitten greys — a technical signature she has refined across her Graphic Studio Dublin career.