Oude huizen Cuffstreet Dublin 1967

This is Dirkje Kuik’s print of old houses in Cuffstreet, Dublin, etched in monochrome. I can just imagine Kuik, bent over the plate, scratching away at the metal, lost in the details of these Dublin buildings. There’s a real sense of depth and texture created through the layering of lines, almost like she's building up the image from the ground, stroke by stroke. The architecture seems to hover between figuration and abstraction as if Kuik is thinking about the passage of time and the process of decay. I wonder if she was thinking about Piranesi and his etchings of Rome, all those crumbling arches and monumental structures. Was she trying to capture a sense of history and memory, or something more personal? Etching can be such an embodied act, there's a real sense of the artist's hand, and their response to the world. These houses in Dublin are not just buildings but fragments of stories.