We Pitched Our Tent in Tokyo

The title is autobiographical in tone and gestures toward a temporary or provisional habitation in Japan — Akino moved from Kyoto to Ireland in the mid-1990s, so a return to Tokyo carries the doubled perspective of someone now resident elsewhere. The print is a pure etching, worked in copper-plate line without aquatint or gold leaf, a register suited to closely observed urban or domestic imagery. Akino's work routinely sits between Irish topography and Japanese visual reference, and this 2020 etching belongs to the second strand: prints that draw on memory of Japan rather than on her Cooley Peninsula surroundings. As a long-standing Graphic Studio Dublin member working primarily in intaglio, she has produced a parallel body of Japan-referenced prints alongside her Irish landscape work, often with titles that acknowledge the position of looking back at one place from another.