There Is No Before or After This

The title invokes a present-tense suspension — phrasing close to Buddhist formulations of the immediate moment, but also recognisable from grief and contemplative writing. Made as a single-medium etching, the image relies on bitten line and any retained plate tone or controlled foul biting Akino chooses to keep, without the broader tonal washes of aquatint. The result tends toward graphic clarity: a place or motif rendered through the discipline of line. The work belongs to Akino's 2024 sequence of titles preoccupied with time, duration, and continuity, alongside Everywhere and Everywhen and It is Happening Even if Nobody Hears It. In the context of an artist trained in printmaking in Kyoto and based in Ireland for nearly three decades, the Buddhist register of the title is not decorative; it sits inside her habitual movement between Japanese visual reference and Irish landscape, and inside a workshop tradition — Graphic Studio Dublin — committed to traditional intaglio rather than to expanded or digital print.