Soon This Too Will Be A Memory

The title carries the mono no aware sensibility — an awareness of impermanence — that runs through much of Akino's work, and is rendered here in aquatint and etching without the gold leaf used in her decorative still-life prints. Aquatint is produced by dusting a copper plate with resin, fusing it, and biting through the resulting porous ground to create continuous tonal fields, a technique suited to atmospheric or memory-laden imagery. Combined with line etching it allows Akino to set drawn detail against soft, dissolved passages of grey or sepia. As a Graphic Studio Dublin member working primarily in intaglio since 1996, she has used the aquatint-and-etching pairing for prints that engage with transience, light and time more than with sharply located subjects, often drawing on the Cooley Peninsula coast around her home or remembered scenes from Japan.